As we all know Bob has sold his music catalogue for vast amounts of money. He obviously knows that when his time finally comes, and he passes away to wherever it is that people pass away to, if anywhere, there will be an incredible upsurge of interest in his music.
It will be wall-to-wall Dylan, with people who know little about his music quickly putting together reviews of his life, tributes, and the rest, most of which will leave anyone who has ever bothered to study his music, running for cover while the lawyers have a field day tracking down unlicensed recordings.
I doubt that Bob wants to give his descendants all the hassle of dealing with that. The copyright arguments, the fake recordings, the bootlegged bootlegs, the disagreements about use in advertising. He wants them to have a quiet and peaceful life, sharing his millions.
And thinking of this, led me in a new direction. Because out of the 622 songs that we have noted on this site that Bob wrote or co-wrote, there are some real gems that that could be brought back to life, possibly as an album called “Untold Dylan”. Which raises some more thoughts.
Because for a start there is no point in putting songs on an album which are unknown, but which are unknown because they don’t actually go anywhere. Bob has of course written a multiplicity of masterpieces which he then abandoned, but he has also written some songs that he dropped after one run through – and quite probably most of us would agree that in some cases this was a wise decision.
So for the Untold Dylan album, we need songs that are really exciting, but which only aficionados will know about. In fact we could see this as our sacred duty. To give the world an album of Dylan songs that they the world has missed, (largely because the world wasn’t paying attention at the time, what with being concerned with wars, football games and stuff like that).
And indeed we have already created some albums on the Untold Dylan You Tube Channel. So a quick bit of checking with Aaron who is our You Tube Master (on the basis that in the old days we used to have WebMasters – so unless there is another name for people who create You Tube series Aaron is a YouTube master) I find he is willing to go with this.
And yes we have created the “Play Lady Play” series, the “Sheep in Wolves Clothing” album, the “Dylan 1980” album (that was my contribution – I’m probably the only person who plays that album but I really do love it), and the “Once only file”.
So I’ve convinced myself: it is time to build a new album, “Untold Dylan”. The great Dylan songs that the average punter who likes Dylan but is not really aware of the history will never have heard of. The one condition is that they have to be available on YouTube.
I’ve checked with Aaron, who lives a mere 6000 miles away from me, and he says he’s ok to do some more You Tube creating, so Untold Dylan, the album, is on the way.
Songs composed by Dylan, which are comparatively unknown, and for which a great recording is available on You Tube. The recording might be by Dylan, but doesn’t have to be.
If you want to make some suggestions, please do. But meanwhile here is my first suggestion. And for this I have to thank Jochen, who first pointed out the existence of this recording.
Untold Dylan: Track 1. Angelina by Ashley Hutchings MBE
Untold Dylan
We are approach 2000 articles on this site. You can find indexes to series linked under the image of Dylan at the top of the page and some relating to recent series on the home page.
Although no one gets paid for writing, publishing or editing Untold Dylan, it does cost us money to keep the site afloat, safe from hackers, n’er-do-wells etc. We never ask for donations, and we try to survive on the income from our advertisers, so if you enjoy Untold Dylan, and you’ve got an ad blocker, could I beg you to turn it off while here. I’m not asking you to click on ads for the sake of it, but at least allow us to add one more to the number of people who see the full page including the adverts. Thanks.
As for the writing, Untold Dylan is written by people who want to write for Untold Dylan. We welcome articles, contributions and ideas from all our readers. Although no one gets paid, if you are published here, your work will be read by a fairly large number of people across the world, ranging from fans to academics. If you have an idea, or a finished piece send it as a Word file to Tony@schools.co.uk with a note saying that it is for publication on Untold Dylan.
We also have a very lively discussion group “Untold Dylan” on Facebook with around 8500 active members. Just type the phrase “Untold Dylan” in, on your Facebook page or follow this link And because we don’t do political debates on our Facebook group there is a separate group for debating Bob Dylan’s politics – Icicles Hanging Down
In the last article I was making the point that Bob’s creative spirit had really risen at the end of 1973 and now he was in full swing producing incredibly varied and brilliant new songs that were taking him once again in a series of new directions, just as had happened in the 1960s.
In the previous year Dylan had explored the ups and downs of relationships with Dirge begins, “I hate myself for loving you,” while “Wedding Song,” begins “I love you more than ever.”
These contradictions of feelings were continued and taking the songs in the order they were composed, after the complex storyline of four characters in “Lily, Rosemary” etc, we had the ever varying lifelines of “Tangled”, the lost love of “You’re a big girl” and then the ultimate “come on” of “Shelter”. My point is thus that Dylan was working a consistent theme here – the ins and outs of feelings within relationships, seen from every angle he could find, and thus it is continued in “Shelter from the Storm” which suggests there is nothing we can latch onto, nothing we can hold, for nothing is fixed. The storm in short, is all around us. We might get shelter for a night, but after that, the storm is liable to leave a trail of destruction in every direction, and as a result, she has gone and oh how he misses her.
That indeed is the theme of all these songs going back to “Dirge”. Nothing is fixed, nothing is secure. And as such, nothing is knowable – and again we find that in “If you see her, say hello”
Life in fact is a storm, and that storm, it seems, can be expressed in many ways and indeed, “If you see her, say hello,” is one of those songs that has within it has a complete multiplicity of many of those ways.
It is also one of those songs that some of the “experts” on Dylan seem to take as a starting point for their own theoretical journey into their personal views as to what Dylan is and is not. My view is the reverse, as I hope I have been able to show. This is a continuation of the theme that Dylan found at the end of the previous year, and which he seems to have been finding a great source of inspiration at this time.
Of course anyone can play the game of finding themes within Dylan’s writing, but in doing so I believe the interpreter of Dylan’s work should be wary on the one hand of missing what is so obviously there for us to see (but which can be missed through having pre-ordined theories or by sticking to the view that each song is individual), and on the other creating theories of meaning which although plausible, are no more plausible than 50 other theories. And what use are 50 theories when we have no evidence as to which one is true?
Now it can be said that I don’t have evidence for the notion that Bob had, at the end of the previous year revitalised his creative power and had discovered this theme of the ebb and flow of life in relationships, but at least without forced upon songs, it fits!
So, to return to the music, the early version of “If you see her” that opens disk three of the Bootleg Series 1-3, reminds us that Dylan is, or was, a fine guitarist, a man who could pluck unusual chords from nowhere to give his music unexpected twists and meanings. It is not all about the lyrics – but it does mean the music fits with the lyrics, which are about the unexpected twists and turns in a relationship and in one’s emotions.
If you really want to hear early Dylan seeking to express himself with both music and lyrics unified, this track is a beautiful example. Even the typical wailing harmonica in its standard place as the penultimate verse, has a point as the song becomes more and restless in the lyric and the music.
In this early recording however Dylan holds himself back much more than in the version on Blood on the Tracks, keeping us within the lyrical and poignant content, until we get to “and I never gotten used to it” as the angst takes over.
The version that most of us know intimately however is the one from the masterpiece album “Blood on the Tracks” which simplifies the musical accompaniment considerably. Here, it is placed after the wild craziness of “Lily Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts” and in total contrast to the previous track it is tentative beyond anything on the earlier version.
Indeed, it is an interesting experiment to play the end of “Lily” running as it does at hyper speed. It’s final line is “Most of all she was thinking about the Jack of Hearts…” Then there is the harmonica verse which seems to leave us with just the organ playing. The between track pause and then that oh so slight, so unsure, opening, as we get the rocking between A and G, which symbolises all uncertainty whenever it starts a pop, rock or folk song.
It is in fact a total and utter contrast to the previous track, and all the more powerful for that.
So what we start with is a hesitant lost love song, just as in the early version, and it feels that at one stage we had something of a rarity, but what we ended up with at least 50 percent is a Dylan song of disdain. It is, “Once upon a time you looked so fine…” and “You’ve got a lot of nerve to say you are my friend” all over again.
Half disdain half lost love. Now there’s a thing.
If you listen to the Blood on the Tracks recording in perfect silence you can hear a slight upping of the ante as the second verse comes in. But still it is peaceful, as the singer describes his lost love. OK he’s heard she is in Tangier, and Tangier is not necessarily a nice place to be (or at least it certainly wasn’t around the time the song was written. I can attest to that out of personal experience). And so he is wondering just what she is getting up to.
And they’ve had a falling out, but it is accepted. It happens. He was really hurt, but he’s not blaming her. If that’s what she needs to do ok.
OK except… if you listen to the version above, three things happen in the song. The speed is different, and the way Bob delivers the lines gives them a completely different meaning. Does he really care any more? His voice is shakey. Is he frantic? Well, maybe but that guitar solo around two minutes is taking us somewhere. It is almost as if Bob is saying, “well yes I used to sing it this way, but you know, I never really felt like that.” It is a re-writing of the song, without changing the words or the chords which is quite something.
So when Bob sings the changed
We had a falling-out, like lovers sometimes do
And to think of how she left that night, hurts me through and through
The “chill” has gone, now he is “hurt” and that is in the music of this version – oh how it is there! And then the instrumental verse contradicts this – he’s pretending to be alright. And then we have the quiet verse….
If you’ve never listened to it in this way, go back and play this, because it is an amazing turn of the moment. We go from light to dark in one line. And there is no way back, for we hear the pain in the lines about her looking him up. Oh he is so desperate.
Oh yes he is in pain. But the musical interlude that follows it, belies the message of the lyrics. He’s with the guys and gals, and having a good time.
This contrast between feelings is quite extraordinary.
So by now Bob has written five songs of depth and potential for what became Blood on the Tracks. And this is unusual because normally with Bob’s writing we also find songs that are cast aside. Not always of course – it didn’t happen with JWH, not least because (according to reports) Bob simply wrote the lyrics one after the other, and then set them to music, knowing he had to do an album. Then he seemed to end up two songs short, and had to put in a couple of country numbers at the end.
Thus there were no rejected songs on JWH, but mostly in the past he has written a collection of songs, and the best ones for the album are pulled out. However with “Blood on the Tracks” that hasn’t happened so far, but now it does, for at this point Bob wrote, and recorded twice, the song “Call Letter Blues.”
Given the songs that have already been written for the album, this is a really strange song to write. It is a classic slow moving blues that actually is hardly moving at all. But it is not just saying the world has gone wrong. It is saying she left – not only did she leave the man, she left the children too. Maybe that was too much to put in a song, or maybe Bob just realised that it simply wasn’t as original as the other material he was producing.
And certainly the originality was still inside him, waiting to get out, for next he composed Simple Twist of Fate
If you have the outtakes or Spotify do play “Call letter blues” and then play “Simple Twist of Fate” for no other reason that the fact there is no comparison between them. Whereas we might all wonder why songs like “Blind Willie McTell” and “Dignity” never made an album, here I suspect everyone would understand why “Call letter” didn’t make it.
Which takes us on to that next composition… Simple Twist of Fate
Unlike the classic blues this can be played in a multiplicity of ways, as this version shows…
We are used this song as being the second track on the album, its position continuing the long established tradition of having an upbeat opening track followed by a slow or sombre second track. Just listen to the end of Tangled up in blue and the opening of this track – the contrast is overwhelming.
But hearing the songs in the order in which they were written takes us on a different journey. “Simple Twist” is a song of magnificence – an incredibly complex revelation contained in six musically identical verses. As such it is a true masterpiece of songwriting which emphasises the fact that “Call Letter” really was an aside, an incidental, a moment’s pause before the serious business of writing continued.
“Simple Twist” is in fact a follow up to “If you see her”. We really do have the story continuing – something that is lost if we play the songs in the order presented on the album. Plus the music is interesting too, for the chord sequence, while not unusual in pop and rock is unusual in Dylan, and it contains the twist of the title line.
The recording is in F major, and the moment within the music that sticks in the memory throughout is the move from B flat to B flat minor in the fourth line (for example “’Twas then he felt alone”). It is not a Dylan invention, but it portrays musically all the pathos and depth of feeling that the lyrics contain.
The accompaniment on the album is simple: the acoustic guitar strumming, bass guitar and harmonica when there is no vocal. Indeed the complexity of the meaning combined with the simplicity of the music has made it a song that many like to sing – Joan Baez included it on Diamonds and Rust, and Brian Ferry on Dylanesque, plus many others. It is a song you can do anything with…
The simplicity of the music seems to be apparent in the lyrics from the start – the lovers meet but the man feels this isn’t going to work for some reason…
They sat together in the park
As the evening sky grew dark
She looked at him and he felt a spark tingle to his bones
’Twas then he felt alone and wished that he’d gone straight
And watched out for a simple twist of fate
So we know there is a history, and wait to find out what. But then two things happen to the song which turn everything upside down. On occasion the “He” becomes “I” while the woman turns out to be a prostitute working the docks and the singer is an old man harking after the charms of a young woman. The he/I dichotomy gives us a difficult feeling, while the tale of an old man and a hooker seems out of place with the gentle melody and chord sequence.
In fact, if ever there is a Dylan song that gives you a knife in the heart after fooling you at the start this is it. You need a strong constitution to take this…
They walked along by the old canal
A little confused, I remember well
And stopped into a strange hotel with a neon burning bright
He felt the heat of the night hit him like a freight train
Moving with a simple twist of fate
Even if we got the changing positions and realities of “Tangled up in blue” sorted out, what are we to make of this “I remember well”. It seems in fact that the story teller is looking back to his past and is so removed from that past that he now confuses his personal memories with those which, because of the pain of the memory, he has had to place outside himself.
If you have ever experienced that pain, and had to take to that final recourse of separation from yourself to deal with it – or should I say if you are old enough to have to do that – then you will know the level of the anguish of what might have been, but now can never be.
So now we think we have this juxtaposition sorted, we understand the pain, but then Dylan hits us again.
A saxophone some place far off played
As she was walking by the arcade
As the light burst through a beat-up shade where he was waking up,
She dropped a coin into the cup of a blind man at the gate
And forgot about a simple twist of fate
He can’t forget her and his casual encounter. But she is up and on with her work, although showing a feeling for those worse off than her that might take us by surprise.
Now Dylan either does one of his time-mix tricks where we find the story is not told in sequence, or he wakes the next day and finds she is not there when he has perhaps been dreaming of her, tries to deal with it, but can’t. I prefer the latter interpretation but that’s just me.
He woke up, the room was bare
He didn’t see her anywhere
He told himself he didn’t care, pushed the window open wide
Felt an emptiness inside to which he just could not relate
Brought on by a simple twist of fate
The “he could not relate” line is the key to the “I” / “he” dichotomy – the “he” and “I” are the same person, because as this line says, the man cannot relate to these feelings. He is truly lost.
Then time passes, he searches her out, desperately hoping to find her again, but nothing is in his control. She has the power and he is lost.
He hears the ticking of the clocks
And walks along with a parrot that talks
Hunts her down by the waterfront docks where the sailors all come in
Maybe she’ll pick him out again, how long must he wait
Once more for a simple twist of fate
And then we move on to this wonderful final, final verse. It hardly feels as if Dylan has been singing a straight strophic song with no variations – that B flat to B flat minor pulls the heart every time and keeps us focused. He draws his conclusion – and for anyone who lives in a world of emotion and feeling – anyone who understands what it means to feel the pain of “if only” knows what he is saying with the opening two lines.
People tell me it’s a sin
To know and feel too much within
I still believe she was my twin, but I lost the ring
She was born in spring, but I was born too late
Blame it on a simple twist of fate
And now the “I” comes back, the eternal wishing for and thinking about a woman whom he met but could never get to know, could never love, but who is forever in his mind. The beautiful woman symbolising everything hopeful – she was born in spring. He is in the autumn of his life, and thus they are forever separated.
So strong is the emotion that the ability to separate himself into the “other man” who had these feelings, and the actual man living in the real world, now breaks down. He is that man, and all the pretending in the world cannot remove that reality.
The pain of memory is there; the pain is eternal.
And there are so many moving versions of the song… this one moves me to tears each time.
Untold Dylan
We are approaching article 2000 on this site. You can find indexes to series linked under the image of Dylan at the top of the page and some relating to recent series on the home page.
Although no one gets paid for writing, publishing or editing Untold Dylan, it does cost us money to keep the site afloat, safe from hackers, n’er-do-wells etc. We never ask for donations, and we try to survive on the income from our advertisers, so if you enjoy Untold Dylan, and you’ve got an ad blocker, could I beg you to turn it off while here. I’m not asking you to click on ads for the sake of it, but at least allow us to add one more to the number of people who see the full page including the adverts. Thanks.
As for the writing, Untold Dylan is written by people who want to write for Untold Dylan. We welcome articles, contributions and ideas from all our readers. Although no one gets paid, if you are published here, your work will be read by a fairly large number of people across the world, ranging from fans to academics. If you have an idea, or a finished piece send it as a Word file to Tony@schools.co.uk with a note saying that it is for publication on Untold Dylan.
We also have a very lively discussion group “Untold Dylan” on Facebook with around 8500 active members. Just type the phrase “Untold Dylan” in, on your Facebook page or follow this link And because we don’t do political debates on our Facebook group there is a separate group for debating Bob Dylan’s politics – Icicles Hanging Down
Over the past two posts we have seen Dylan bringing his old sixties hits back to life for the nineties, in a series of stunning performances that mark a distinct improvement on previous years. If you take the last two posts and this one, we have twenty-five of Dylan’s foundation songs given new arrangements and impassioned performances. With three years behind them, the band sound at home in the material, and Dylan’s bizarre guitar style (Mr Guitar Man!) is still evident but often muted and, especially when he plays the acoustic guitar, well integrated into the overall sound.
A good place to start is that dirge to approaching death, ‘Knocking on Heaven’s Door’. In these later versions, with the addition of the words, ‘Just like so many times before’, the song becomes a hymn of spiritual yearning and the desire for liberation. In this case the last verse finishes at 4.10 mins leaving another three and half minutes of guitar work in which Mr Guitar Man’s complex weaving of dark notes does the work of expressing that yearning. This one’s from the Boston concert.
The anthemic character of the song makes for a good encore, as does ‘All Along the Watchtower’. I don’t think this version quite matches the scintillating, jazzy 1992 performance, but it’s getting there. The song lends itself to an apocalyptic clash of guitars. This one, from the Woodstock concert, is up on You Tube (at least for the moment) and I was amazed at the negative reactions to Dylan’s vocal style, which some couldn’t get their heads around. Here’s a sample of the comments:
Lol I can't tell if he's being serious.
Why, oh why, is Bob singing it like that?
what the heck Bob?
This is disappointing to watch. Bob Dylan has the ability
to sing a lot better than that,
it's like he's being awful on purpose.
Seriously he is taking the piss out of every one of you.
Dylan on helium amphetamine high speed dubbing.
It deadass sounds like Popeye is singing the lyrics.
He is too lazy to stop so he decided to say all the lyrics at once.
How did this auction end up then ? What was the highest bid ??
Did he drink helium?
I’m struggling, but I’m not able to enjoy that.
I think if there’s no Hendrix, that song stays in the drawer.
Good Lord! There is some serious disconnect here. I…er…like the performance. There is an urgency in those rushed vocals, and every word comes clear. Just because he doesn’t try to sing it like Hendrix… But there is something else here, a tendency for Dylan to sing across the melody line. I see it (or rather hear it) as a deliberate ploy, not to wreck the song but to create a dissonance that draws attention to the lyrics. Heaven forbid that we become too comfortable with this song and its message.
And Mr Guitar man may be no Hendrix, but he sure can be insistent.
Over to you.
While we’re on the subject of songs that work well as encores, let’s try that sister song to ‘It’s All Over Now Baby Blue’, ‘It Ain’t Me Babe’. This nearly nine minute performance joins the ranks of the great acoustic performances that Dylan has been springing on us for the last couple of years. Once more the vocals are passionate and inventive, and Dylan’s spiky acoustic guitar sure pushes the song along. Brilliantly, he sings around the melody rather than right on it, pushing the words in unexpected directions.
And then, the vulnerable, trembling harp that veers into squeaky climaxes. What more can I say? Vintage Dylan indeed.
Another powerhouse performance from the Woodstock concert – ‘Just Like a Woman’. This is a contentious song that I have characterised as expressing vulnerability, but many have seen it as a full on attack song dripping with contempt. The insinuating leer that marked the album version has gone from Dylan’s voice in this rendition which is both open and passionate. There is more agony than spite in this 1994 version. And some great steel guitar work.
Switching back to the gentler sounds of the Unplugged concert, we find ‘My Back Pages’, generally considered to be a seminal Dylan song, signalling his change of direction in 1964 from acoustic protest to surreal electric.
The lyrics are quite dense and the sound worked on. But the movement from moral certainty to moral uncertainty was to haunt Dylan for the rest of his life, and he would seek that moral certainty once more during his Christian period, 1979 – 81. In ‘Ring Them Bells’ he laments the ‘breaking down the distance between right and wrong’.
‘In a soldier's stance, I aimed my hand at the mongrel dogs who teach
Fearing not that I'd become my enemy in the instant that I preach
My existence led by confusion boats, mutiny from stern to bow
Ah, but I was so much older then, I'm younger than that now
Yes, my guard stood hard when abstract threats too noble to neglect
Deceived me into thinking I had something to protect
Good and bad, I define these terms quite clear, no doubt, somehow
Ah, but I was so much older then I'm younger than that now’
‘I Don’t Believe You’ was years later to be complemented by ‘I Believe in You’, which expresses the opposite sentiment. ‘I Don’t Believe You’ is a strong reaction to a snub, to rejection. Remember the high-pitched yelling versions from 1966, when Dylan turned this acoustic song into an electric cry of pain.
This 1994 version, from the Krakow concert (7/17/1994), is most unusual for the sound the band creates. It may be the recording itself. It is very punky yet oddly muted. This one has slowly grown on me. The jazzy harmonica break certainly helps. I believe that’s rain you can hear pattering in the background.
I don’t think Dylan ever finished a concert with his Blonde on Blonde classic, ‘Absolutely Sweet Marie’, but I have no problem finishing this Absolutely Vintage Dylan series with it. It’s a foot-tapper. I’m not quite sure what I think of it without the young Dylan’s adolescent sounding whine, but I’m a sucker for the lyrics, how they hint at and rely on some unstated context, and how exactly they capture resentment, and resentment is what it’s all about.
The song contains one of Dylan’s most famous aphoristic lines: ‘To live outside the law you must be honest’. Paradoxical, but it makes perfect sense. I think, however that the line should be read in context:
‘Well, six white horses that you did promise
Were finally delivered down to the penitentiary
But to live outside the law, you must be honest
I know you always say that you agree
Alright, so where are you tonight, Sweet Marie?’
Those six white horses come straight out of the blues, perhaps from ‘See That My Grave Is Kept Clean’ but they pop up again in ‘Yonder Comes Sin’ (1981) as six wild horses.
‘I say: See them six wild horses, honey.
You say: I don't even see one..
You say: Point them out to me, love.
I say: Honey I got to run.’
However, back to the famous aphorism, the real kicker seems to me to lie in the following line. The two should be taken together:
‘But to live outside the law, you must be honest
I know you always say that you agree’
But is she honest? That’s what the first line is building to. The world of Blonde on Blonde is full of duplicity, and despite the aphorism, we just don’t know whom to trust.
This is another from the other Unplugged.
So that brings to a close this three part survey of Dylan’s 1994 performances of his sixties classics. I trust you have enjoyed yourselves. If you are having a Xmas break enjoy it. We look forward to a brighter 2021, we hope, and I’ll be back to see how Dylan handled his post sixties work in this breakthrough year of 1994.
Kia Ora
Untold Dylan
We are approaching article 2000 on this site. You can find indexes to series linked under the image of Dylan at the top of the page and some relating to recent series on the home page.
Although no one gets paid for writing, publishing or editing Untold Dylan, it does cost us money to keep the site afloat, safe from hackers, n’er-do-wells etc. We never ask for donations, and we try to survive on the income from our advertisers, so if you enjoy Untold Dylan, and you’ve got an ad blocker, could I beg you to turn it off while here. I’m not asking you to click on ads for the sake of it, but at least allow us to add one more to the number of people who see the full page including the adverts. Thanks.
As for the writing, Untold Dylan is written by people who want to write for Untold Dylan. We welcome articles, contributions and ideas from all our readers. Although no one gets paid, if you are published here, your work will be read by a fairly large number of people across the world, ranging from fans to academics. If you have an idea, or a finished piece send it as a Word file to Tony@schools.co.uk with a note saying that it is for publication on Untold Dylan.
We also have a very lively discussion group “Untold Dylan” on Facebook with around 8500 active members. Just type the phrase “Untold Dylan” in, on your Facebook page or follow this link And because we don’t do political debates on our Facebook group there is a separate group for debating Bob Dylan’s politics – Icicles Hanging Down
Where Ma Rainey and Beethoven once unwrapped their bedroll
Both in interviews and in his songs, Dylan demonstrates a fairly universal, predictable development with regard to established high culture: as a young guy he dismisses it, in middle age he recognises its value, as an older man he is not embarrassed to vent his admiration loud and clear. T.S. Eliot’s work is still called soft-boiled egg shit in the 60’s and the young savage Dylan claims straight-faced: “I never did admire him”, in the 70’s Dylan still finds him “aloof”, unworldly and acting high-brow. But in the Biograph interview with Cameron Crowe in 1985 Eliot is already mentioned in the same line-up as Elvis Presley and Albert Camus, in the line-up of artists who had a big impact on me. In the twenty-first century, in Chronicles, the autobiographer, who is now in his sixties, confesses: “I liked T.S. Eliot. He was worth reading,” and a few years later the DJ Dylan admiringly quotes the first eleven lines of Eliot’s “The Waste Land” in his radio programme Theme Time Radio Hour.
The appreciation of another untouchable big shot has a similar development. In 2020, on Rough And Rowdy Ways, Beethoven will be alpha and omega. In the opening song, “I Contain Multitudes” the protagonist declares, “I play Beethoven’s sonatas”, at the end of the majestic finale, “Murder Most Foul,” the narrator requests to play “Moonlight Sonata in F-sharp”. Unambiguous appreciation; Beethoven’s Piano Sonata no. 14 stands among the enumeration of pieces of music which the narrator apparently considers to be implacable, comforting and beautiful masterpieces.
But at first, Dylan’s associations with Beethoven are perhaps a bit disrespectful, or at least pretty narrow-minded, even to a less snobby cultural snob. Downright dismissing is the angry young man back in ’66, during a press conference in Denmark:
“What’s your favourite music?” Dylan asks a woman reporter.
“Beethoven,” she replies, “I’m very fond of Beethoven’s Symphonies.”
“Yes, but I was thinking more of your favourite music,” the bully continues.
“But it is Beethoven,” the lady repeats, rather brusquely.
“Oh come on,” says Dylan, “what’s your favourite music?”
…implying that Beethoven, of course, is not really music. Which ties in with Dylan’s memories in Chronicles. Just arrived in New York, the young folk singer is staying here and there, among others with “Ray and Chloe”. Ray’s record collection doesn’t really appeal. “Mostly, it was classical music and jazz bands.” But Dylan puts some on anyway.
“Once I put on Beethoven’s Pathetique Sonata — it was melodic, but then again, it sounded like a lot of burping and belching and other bodily functions. It was funny — sounded almost like a cartoon.”
“Burping and belching”? The “Pathétique”? That is not only a bizarre and embarrassingly stupid disqualification, but also quite hard to follow – just like “other bodily functions”, whatever he might mean by that, cannot be discovered either. Perhaps Dylan is familiar with the performance of Glenn Gould, who as usual gets carried away, audibly moaning and humming – but that recording is from 1967, so at the time, at Ray and Chloe’s house, it couldn’t be on the turntable.
The other (dis)qualification, “like a cartoon”, is easier to trace. Like most of us, Dylan first came into contact with classical music through cartoons. We know Liszt’s “Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2”, for example, thanks to Tom & Jerry’s The Cat Concerto. Rossini’s “Barber Of Seville”, both the Overture and arias, via Woody Woodpecker, Droopy, Tom & Jerry, Daffy Duck and Bugs Bunny (Long Haired Hare and of course The Rabbit Of Seville, both from 1949). Mozart’s “Sonata No. 16 in C major” (KV 545) can be heard in dozens of Warner Bros. cartoons, Nazis are usually introduced with and accompanied by Wagner or Strauss (as in Bugs Bunny’s meeting with Hermann Goering in the Black Forest, after Bugs took his traditional wrong turn at Albuquerque, in Herr Meets Hare, 1945) and Chopin’s “Marche Funèbre” sounds at almost every Looney Tune death or funeral scene.
If we should choose to believe Dylan’s recollection, the cartoon association triggered by the “Pathétique” must be due to Bugs Bunny Rides Again (1948), one of those typical films by the genius Fritz Freleng, the spiritual father of immortal heroes such as Bugs, Daffy and Yosemite Sam. There his brilliant music director Carl Stalling demonstrates how you can forge one, continuously exciting, whole from eighteen very different music fragments. In these seven minutes we hear among others Rossini’s “William Tell Overture”, Schubert’s “Erl King”, again Rossini (“Inflammatus”, from the Stabat Mater) and Wagner’s “Siegfried”. And a fragment of Beethoven’s “Pathétique”, in the this town ain’t big enough for the both of us-confrontation of Yosemite Sam with Bugs, in the saloon.
More iconic, however, is the use of Beethoven’s “cartoon-like” sonata in the television special A Boy Named Charlie Brown. Towards the end of that film is the overwhelming scene with Schroeder on his toy piano, who then plays the second movement from the “Pathétique”. The viewer is carried along with Schroeder’s rapture, in a dreamlike, psychedelic scene full of colour explosions, liquid slides, surreal Gothic symbolism, stylised panoramas of German towns, impressions of Vienna, pop-art portraits of Beethoven and Beethoven’s death mask.
Again absolutely no burping and belching, by the way. Anyway, the film is from 1969. Dylan’s cartoon association can therefore at most have entered his autobiographical memories as constructed memory. But much more likely, Dylan’s use of the Beethoven-recollection is as imprecise and incorrect as the “memories” of the books he reads while staying at Ray and Chloe’s – in this same chapter he pours out names such as Pericles, Tacitus and Thucydides and links these names to book titles that do not exist or have been written by others.
Still: Dylan at least expresses an opinion to Beethoven’s music. The other greatness in this penultimate verse of “Tombstone Blues”, Ma Rainey, is actually only used as a point of reference, as most people do, unfortunately. Usually with regard to her reputation, her appearance or her charisma – it’s never really about her music. In interviews, Dylan mentions her name at most as an example in a list of Great Artists, and in Chronicles her name comes up to explain how great Joan Baez is: just as with Memphis Minnie and Ma Rainey, “there was nothing girlish about Joan either”.
It is a somewhat bitter fate for the “Mother Of Blues”, who – to name but one – made the first recording of “See See Rider Blues”, but it is how it is. Ever since the 1950s, barely twenty years after her death in 1939, her appearance is apparently more memorable than her music. As in an – otherwise beautiful – scene in Jack Kerouac’s The Dharma Bums (1958):
A big fat woman like Ma Rainey was standing there with her legs outspread howling out a tremendous sermon in a booming voice that kept breaking from speech to blues-singing music, beautiful, and the reason why this woman, who was such a great preacher, was not preaching in a church was because every now and then she just simply had to go sploosh and spit as hard as she could off to the side in the grass, “And I’m tellin you, the Lawd will take care of you if you recognize that you have a new field . . . Yes!”—and sploosh, she turns and spits about ten feet away a great sploosh of spit.
Or as in Allen Ginsberg’s moving elegy to his deceased mother, “Kaddish” from 1959: “O mother, with your eyes of Ma Rainey dying in an ambulance”.
In this one line from “Tombstone Blues” there is no mention of her musical merit either. Her merit here is that she has given an unspecified location historical status by unwrapping a bedroll together with an antique German composer. Some analysts, such as Polizotti, search and find a deeper layer therein. Ma Rainey and Beethoven then symbolise something like an alliance of “the modern and the classical”, more or less the same thing Dylan does with a song like this – modern, surrealistic poetry embedded in an old, classical blues, allying the modern and the classical.
Well. You may see it that way, obviously. But it is to be feared that “Ma Rainey” has been chosen mainly for the sound of these syllables, because it has the same metrical foot, the amphibrach, as “Beet-ho-ven”; short-long-short. Which, by the way, is due to Chuck Berry; all generations since “Roll Over Beethoven” say Beethoven, emphasizing “-ho-“. And not, as it should be, Beethoven. Understandable; “Roll over Beethoven and tell Tchaikovsky the news” simply does not run as smoothly as roll over Beethoven.
Though Schroeder probably would have an opinion thereon.
To be continued. Next up: Tombstone Blues part XI
———
Jochen is a regular reviewer of Dylan’s work on Untold. His books are available via Amazon both in paperback and on Kindle:
We are approaching article 2000 on this site. You can find indexes to series linked under the image of Dylan at the top of the page and some relating to recent series on the home page.
Although no one gets paid for writing, publishing or editing Untold Dylan, it does cost us money to keep the site afloat, safe from hackers, n’er-do-wells etc. We never ask for donations, and we try to survive on the income from our advertisers, so if you enjoy Untold Dylan, and you’ve got an ad blocker, could I beg you to turn it off while here. I’m not asking you to click on ads for the sake of it, but at least allow us to add one more to the number of people who see the full page including the adverts. Thanks.
As for the writing, Untold Dylan is written by people who want to write for Untold Dylan. We welcome articles, contributions and ideas from all our readers. Although no one gets paid, if you are published here, your work will be read by a fairly large number of people across the world, ranging from fans to academics. If you have an idea, or a finished piece send it as a Word file to Tony@schools.co.uk with a note saying that it is for publication on Untold Dylan.
We also have a very lively discussion group “Untold Dylan” on Facebook with around 8500 active members. Just type the phrase “Untold Dylan” in, on your Facebook page or follow this link And because we don’t do political debates on our Facebook group there is a separate group for debating Bob Dylan’s politics – Icicles Hanging Down
This was performed three times ranging from May 1961 through to July 2019 – so it has a longevity in Dylan’s memory even if only rarely played.
It was written in 1907 by Ada R. Habershon with music by Charles H. Gabriel. However it is now in the public domain as the copyright was not registered (or possibly has lapsed, but I think the former).
It was also recorded by the Carter Family which is perhaps why it has retained an affection for Dylan.
This was released in 1935, and is enough of a variant from the original for it to have been copyrighted and that copyright is still in effect. I have a great affection for the Jeff Buckley version, but unfortunately the version on the internet is of poor quality. It is however the only version that I know that he did of it.
but if you want something brighter, then this one is fun with Johnny Cash
Now something very different – Wild Mountain Thyme.
Bob performed this on 22 June 1988 at the Riverbend Music Centre, Cincinnati. I haven’t found a copy of that gig on line, hence this much earlier one. But really I do like this acoustic version. The two of them sound very together, and the accompaniment is very unusual for this song with its insistant off-beat. Since I found this I’ve been playing it over and over.
So long Good Luck Goodbye
This comes from 12 January 1990, performed in New Haven (I think).
It is a classic 1950s rock n roll song… written by Weldon Rogers (1927-2004), who was also the founder of Je-Wel records which released the first Roy Orbison record.
https://youtu.be/AkBq_PW0-E0
I am now going to cheat to end with and include a song I’ve included before, just because I really like it so much, and maybe today we’ve got some readers who have not ventured this way before. It’s Weeping Willow.
As we have noted in recent articles, Bob Dylan had a prolonged period from 1968 to 1973 in which he was writing songs at nothing like his earlier levels of productivity. The total number of songs was much reduced but despite this he was by and large not producing songs that were considered by most listeners to be of a quality akin to that found in the songs he had composed with much more frequency in earlier years.
Of those songs that were written we might perhaps note these eight of being of particular merit, although I know many who would cut this list down to perhaps just three or four compositions written during these six years – particularly questioning my continuing insistence of including the last two songs of the era: “Dirge” and “Wedding Song” and perhaps the much lighter piece, “You Angel You”.
Given that from 1965 alone many fans of Dylan’s work would be able to list a dozen songs they would put in the “genius” class (from “Chimes of Freedom” to “It’s alright ma”) even if you agree with my selection of the eight songs above, the fact that it took Bob six years to write these, shows how far his creative genius output had dropped.
But now, as we have seen, at the start of 1974 Dylan had written two songs (Lily, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts and Tangled up in blue) which most fans would list as among his greatest works, it shows how far Dylan’s creative output had risen once again.
The third song Dylan wrote in 1974 was “You’re a big girl now” which has always struck me as the reverse of “Just like a Woman” where she breaks just like a little girl. I don’t see any woman or girl breaking in “Big girl”. Rather I find a man who is broken, and there really is only one way to read lines such as…
I’m going out of my mind, oh,
With a pain that stops and starts
Like a corkscrew to my heart
Ever since we’ve been apart
As we have seen through the various analyses conducted on this site, “lost love” as a lyrical theme has been one of Dylan’s prime approaches to lyrics, and here he is revisiting the theme once more.
There are also moments of Hank Williams here, in particular “I Can’t Help It (If I’m Still in Love With You),” but that it turns out Dylan’s song is far more complex than most lost love pieces. Even if we stick to the level of analytics rather than emotions, we find an unusual song in that the rhyme scheme is inconsistent, being at the start
A A
B C
D D
but later in verses three and five mutating to
A A
B
C C C
It doesn’t affect the listener, and I doubt that most people ever notice, but it does indicate the flexibility Bob had in his writing at this point. He wasn’t going to force rhymes just because he started out that way. The melody and the plaintive message would carry the listener through, he knew that.
To me “Big Girl” is one of the most successful, overpoweringly emotional songs of Dylan’s whole writing career – perhaps the ultimate emotional song in his entire output.
There is just so much here to hit anyone who has had a deep, intense, meaningful loving relationship which has ended with the other party leaving. So much that one could sink into its hurt and pain and never re-emerge. And what Dylan has done is given us an alternative to the mists of Visions and Johanna, or the anger of Idiot Wind. Another way of seeing the world.
The recording heard above has to be taken alongside the last songs of the previous year. It is as if Dylan decided to write “The Book of Emotions” through Dirge, Wedding Song, and now this. “You want emotions?” he is saying, “I’ll give you emotions…”
But what has happened is that some of those who comment on Dylan’s work, for some reason feel the need to distance themselves from the emotion, sometimes not even engaging with the emotional content of the song at all, as if they, the commentators, are emotionless entities about to comment upon the poor sap in the song crying about his heart being broken.
Yet this is totally nonviable as a method of critiquing the song . If you have never experienced the real highs and lows of emotion it must be hard to understand what is going on here. A bit like a person who has never been to Greece writing a critique of a travel guide to Greece. How can you comment upon a song that deals with these emotions if you have not experienced them? How can you critique a travel guide to Greece without having been to the country? If you have experienced those highs and lows, then you know that they are indescribable while one is within them, and beyond understanding when one has passed through and come out the other side.
It is not just “Our conversation was short and sweet, It nearly swept me off my feet, And I’m back in the rain, oh, And you are on dry land,” it is also that absolute self-destructiveness of the whole concept.
I’m going out of my mind, oh,
With a pain that stops and starts
Like a corkscrew to my heart
Ever since we’ve been apart
He doesn’t even have the strength to blame her, he has lost so much of himself every normal emotion has gone. This is desolation and isolation, hopelessness and emptiness, all rolled into one song. You can face the sheer horror of them “selling postcards of the hanging” and know that this actually happened, but when it is as personal as this it can get so overpowering there is nowhere else to turn and no way to take it all in.
Of course if we could find that time machine that was lurking around in “Tangled up in blue”, maybe we could escape the pain. But there’s never a time machine around when you want one. It’s either wandered off of its own accord, or you’ve lost the key.
On Blood on the Tracks, the sleeve notes quote Yates, “We make out of the quarrel with others rhetoric, but of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry.” Or as the All Music review said of this song, “It is like seeing your father cry for the first time.” There really is no escape from pain of this sort… you just have to let it take its course.
In another review I found, the writer reflects on taking a regular session called “Sociology of Rock ‘n Roll” at Ohio University taught by a lecturer who himself wrote protest and folk songs.
One Friday he solemnly laid down his guitar, put his hand over his heart, and vowed that he could never write another song. It was all hopeless. He waved a purple album cover in front of us. “This,” he said, “has done me in. You can’t write a better album than this. There’s no sense in even trying.”
It wasBlood on the Tracks, … There was only one song that immediately struck me, sitting in that bar, and it still raises the hairs on the back of my neck.
The writer of that piece then takes us into “Big Girl”.
Musically the two versions are very different – even the chord structure has changed, the NY version being much, much more complex, but then sounding (strangely) simpler because of the way the accompaniment is arranged.
The album version runs a chord sequence of
Bm, Am, Bm Am
G C G C
Am Bm Am D
On the New York version the guitar is also tuned in a completely different way and the chords are (thanks to Dylanchords.info because I certainly struggled with this)…
Emaj7, B11, Emaj7, B11
E, B, A, E, B, A
F#7, Emaj7, B11, E, A, E, B
If you are a musician you’ll know what I mean, but even if not, you might notice that we have in here chords never mentioned before in any review on this site – Dylan rarely, if ever, at this stage of his career used chords like “E major 7” or B11. These are very unusual chords – not unknown, just not normally used, and they give the song a new effect as Dylan takes us to a different land – a land he returned to much, much later.
Perhaps the utter brilliance of the song, and certainly the painfulness of the song is that we know something is going terribly, terribly, terribly wrong. And has anyone expressed this so powerfully before as
Bird on the horizon, sittin’ on a fence
He’s singin’ his song for me at his own expense
And I’m just like that bird, oh, oh,
Singin’ just for you
I hope that you can hear
Hear me singin’ through these tears
I have no escape, there is no solution, there is, in fact, nothing.
My one hope, if you are reading this, and you feel up to it (ie not if you are within six months of a serious breakup and there is no sign of anyone new on the horizon), you listen to both versions of the song, and then maybe listen again, not to the voice, but to what the instruments are doing. We are talking two different languages in the construction of this song, and that in itself is a masterpiece.
During the next 30 years Dylan played this song over 200 times in concert. Looking at the totals of live performances that is only three fewer than Visions, and half the number of times he’s played Tweedle Dum. He wanted to say it, each performance of this song takes it out of the singer – at least it does if he is thinking about the lyrics.
But let me leave you with a comment from a reviewer on the internet.
“I haven’t played Blood in the Tracks for a few years, but I’ve been listening to it over the past few days. I’m going to play that song at an upcoming arts conference. And I’m going to talk about why the words “oh, oh” might constitute some of the best songwriting ever.”
I can see exactly what he means.
Here’s the original version
Quite extraordinarily, the next song Bob wrote was another masterpiece, and Shelter from the storm takes Dylan’s magnificent return to songwriting form even further.
Of course he had written masterpiece after masterpiece before, and it is possible that Dylan tried out several other songs in between these compositions – songs which have simply been lost. But it seems unlikely. Over 620 songs written by Bob Dylan have survived, why would the non-album pieces here be so utterly removed from public consumption?
So if we take it that what we know about is the sum of Dylan’s writing at the time, we have to look back to periods such as 1962 wherein, “Hard Rain,” “Hollis Brown,” “John Brown,” and “Don’t think twice” one after the other. Or perhaps the start of 1963 as he produced “Masters of War,” “Girl from the North Country”, “Spanish Leather,” and “Dylan’s Dream”, hardly (its seems) pausing for breath. Indeed 1963 had another stream of amazing compositions one after the other at the end of the year, ending with “Restless Farewell.”
But then as we have seen, eventually Bob ran out of steam. Yet now here he was producing masterpiece after masterpiece for next came “Shelter From the Storm.”
And not just another masterpiece – but another change of subject
Lily, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts: a rambling epic tale of four characters
Tangled up in blue: An ever-changing relationship in a seemingly ever changing world
You’re a big girl now: lost love, deep hurt, and there’s nothing to be done
Shelter from the storm: the world is a storm, there is nothing we can catch onto, nothing is fixed.
These are complex themes, far beyond the reach of 99.999% of song lyrics, and is one is so different in both temperament and style. And each has its own input, its own approach, its own vision, its own issues that it is explaining, relating, and perhaps resolving.
“Shelter from the Storm” adds another dimension in that there is a disconnect between the verses (as happens in “Tangled”), and yet the same line ends each verse, which suggests there ought to be a connection but somehow we can’t find it. The world is nonsense, there is nothing we can latch onto, there is no reality that is fixed. Indeed when we get to
Well, the deputy walks on hard nails and the preacher rides a mount
But nothing really matters much, it’s doom alone that counts
And the one-eyed undertaker, he blows a futile horn
we are left wondering “Where did that come from? Where does it take us?”
And all the while the same three chords are repeated and repeated as if there is a stability here, right under our feet… except we can feel it going round and round. As if somehow we are fixed but the world around us changes in ways that are completely beyond our understanding or control – and yet at the same time we seem to be in there, handling the affair, continuing our life. It is like a recurring nightmare where one cannot take control, but it is not a nightmare at all because she is there all the time offering shelter.
Long before Dylan won the Nobel Prize for Literature, Heylin, called this “a lyric worthy of any poet laureate”, which shows a rare bit of insight, even if it was wholly fortuitous in its predictive sense. For once I’m with Heylin on this one, and so it seems was the Nobel Prize committee.
Dylan had moved on from being the guy who wanted to get away from it all and live in a remote rural idyll to becoming a myth maker. The creator of worlds that are condensed into a song format, but which could, at a moment’s notice, be opened up, into something much broader.
Of course Dylan is not a myth maker in the true sense, for the songs are not complex or long enough to have the feeling of the myth, although in the missing 11th verse he gets closest…
Now the bonds are broken but they can be retied
By one more journey to the woods, and the holes where spirits hide
It's a never ending battle for a peace that's always torn
"Come in," she said, "I'll give you shelter from the storm"
which gives us the real clue as to what Bob was about. This is Dylan playing with images, showing us that lyrics can paint any picture, even against the simplest of musical textures. And that is brilliant; of course it is a brilliant song. The chords rotate, the melody follows, nothing changes, nothing moves on. The instrumentation is played out in the same terms of never-endingness. Round and round it could go on forever.
Here’s a variant I’m not sure it is better but hearing a different approach reminds us of just how much there is in this world of an endlessly repeating melody, rhythm and chords.
To me this represents the conflict of the man perceiving beauty and his desire to possess it (which will ultimately destroy that peaceful beauty). Hence the simple presentation, the repeats and repeats, and yet the complexity encoded in the lyrics.
Steve Adey actually went further in recording it and took it so slowly that it lasted forever, which fits the end, and tells us what else is possible if you have eight minutes to spare.
But overall, if you want an image for this song, just think of a cottage with no other habitation around, and a howling wind blowing outside, with all manner of evil lurking in the dark as the thunder crashes and rain falls. Then you have it. But as you find your own image, just remember those opening lines…
’Twas in another lifetime, one of toil and blood
When blackness was a virtue and the road was full of mud
Here’s the world:
In a world of steel-eyed death, and men who are fighting to be warm
And this is her:
Try imagining a place where it’s always safe and warm
And this is the singer:
I was burned out from exhaustion, buried in the hail
Poisoned in the bushes an’ blown out on the trail
Hunted like a crocodile, ravaged in the corn
She ends his torture…
She walked up to me so gracefully and took my crown of thorns
She is a goddess, he is a mortal, his pain self-inflicted. He wants to possess beauty, but knows that he cannot – and yet he can’t let go of that desire. In the end that’s it. He wants to possess, but she will not let him for beauty is to be shared, always, always, always.
Many people find this to be the greatest re-working of all by Bob. I’m not sure if it is the best, but to me it passes the eight minutes with more meaning and insight than I get from Adey.
Untold Dylan
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Now I wish I could give Brother Bill his great thrill I would set him in chains at the top of the hill
Then send out for some pillars and Cecil B. DeMille
He could die happily ever after
Millions of people who have never read or even heard of William Burroughs can easily quote from The Nova Trilogy:
Here comes Johnny Yen again
With the liquor and drugs
And the flesh machine
He’s gonna do another striptease,
and the hypnotizing chickens, the modern guy and the gimmick… Iggy Pop’s world hit from 1977, “Lust For Life”, draws exuberantly from The Ticket That Exploded (1962) and turns Burroughs’ side-kick Johnny Yen, “the striptease God of sexual frustration”, into a main character. In the same novel, by the way, the author of Junkie also introduces the concept of heavy metal, of which the boundaries have been stretched quite a bit by The Godfather Of Punk with his first band, The Stooges.
Iggy Pop is a fan, that should be obvious. Partly for this reason, the BBC invites him to participate in, or rather to co-host a radio programme on Burroughs in 2014, on the occasion of the hundredth birthday of the Beat Poet. Iggy happily accepts, confirms in the programme the tribute in “Lust For Life” and adds:
“This is coming out of some LustforLife, all right. He’s not just in my music. Burroughs is everywhere. He’s in Dylan’s TombstoneBlues. He’s on the cover of SergeantPepper’s two rows behind Paul, right next to Marilyn Monroe. He inspired band names like the Soft Machine, a great band, and Steely Dan, which is named after a strap-on dildo in NakedLunch. I didn’t know that.”
Burroughs’ presence in Dylan’s “Tombstone Blues”, Iggy explains, is officially confirmed by the supporting role for Brother Bill, one of The Priest’s nicknames, as another nickname says. Which, by the way, also draws a line to “Desolation Row”, to a perfect image of a priest, from the verse in which, as in “Tombstone Blues”, there are more Burrough references, paraphrases and winks.
In terms of content (expressing the wish to satisfy the Beat Poet), the opening line reflects Dylan’s artistic and cultural admiration for the – at the time – 51-year-old nestor. In these days the only meeting between the two word artists takes place, in a cafe in Greenwich Village. Dylan is impressed, and also charmed by Burroughs’ cut-up technique, an admiration he professes in a few interviews in 1965. “I thinks he’s a great man,” he says in the late summer of ’65 interview with Edmiston and Ephron, following his expressed awe for the cut-up technique.
The cut-up technique, which Dylan seems to want to imitate in both “Tombstone Blues” and “Desolation Row”, is still relatively new in 1965. Burroughs’ first books, Junkie and Queer are still quite straightforward. The writing process for Naked Lunch already approaches the technique; the basis for that legendary work consists of seemingly randomly pasted pieces from Burroughs’ so-called Word Hoard, from paragraphs, sentences and fragments of sentences from the pile of paper (about a thousand sheets) that Brother Bill, with the help of among others Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac typed away in Tangier, spring 1957.
For The Nova Trilogy, or The Cut-Up Trilogy, as he also called it, Burroughs then uses the same Word Hoard (especially for The Soft Machine, but in The Ticket That Exploded and in Nova Express we see the same fragments, names and weird attributes again) – this time in a conscious attempt to “rearrange”, as a conscious attempt to develop a new writing technique.
Dylan’s approach, however, seems different. Burroughs sees language as a virus, as a weapon that is used to keep us under control – and which, in turn, can also be used as a weapon against it. “The word, of course, is one of the most powerful instruments of control… Now if you start cutting these up and rearranging them you are breaking down the control system,” as he explains in an interview with Daniel Odiers for The Job.
Dylan takes a more playful approach, seems to use cut-ups mainly to surprise, without further text-transcending intentions. More old-fashioned than Burroughs in fact – Dylan’s lyrics call to mind sooner the collage-like effect of the surrealists, rather than the deliberately destructive force of the Beat Poets. Nor would a Ginsberg or a Kerouac hardly allow themselves to be tempted into a relatively simple, cabaretesque wordplay like die happily ever after, with which surrealists like Duchamp or Margritte, on the other hand, would not have the slightest problem.
The same applies to the apparent need to maintain at least some order in the chaos. In this Brother Bill quatrain, for example, the Samson & Delilah story is still the silver thread, to which now the greeting to William Burroughs is attached.
After Samson’s weapon and enemies in the seventh quatrain, the jawbone and the philistines, and his femme fatale Delilah in the ninth quatrain, a fitting farewell is now being said to the legendary long-haired judge; after all, the pillars are indeed the suicide instrument;
And Samson took hold of the two middle pillars upon which the house stood, and on which it was borne up, of the one with his right hand, and of the other with his left.
And Samson said, Let me die with the Philistines. And he bowed himself with all his might; and the house fell upon the lords, and upon all the people that were therein. So the dead which he slew at his death were more than they which he slew in his life.
(Judges 16:29-30)
Cecil B. DeMille’s film adaptation (Samson and Delilah, 1949) is much more forgiving of Delilah. With DeMille she is not worthlessly at home, with tears on her cheeks from laughing. In the film, Delilah (an irresistible Hedy Lamarr) really loves her Nazirite and, tormented by remorse, helps him in his final moments. During the public humiliation by the Philistines, she beats a whip around the waist of the blind Samson and then leads him up the stairs to the pillars. The roaring audience expects that up there, as an ultimate humiliation, she will make Samson kneel and make him renounce his God. “Are these the pillars on which the temple rests?” he asks her when they are upstairs, and when she confirms:
“Go Delila, into the courtyard. Death will come into this temple. The hand of the Lord will strike.”
“I will not be afraid.”
“You must leave now. Wherever you are, my love is with you. Go!”
But Delilah decides to die with her beloved and stays, hiding only a few steps away. “Delilah! Have you gone?” Samson shouts, but the silently weeping Philistine beauty does not answer.
The tears on her cheeks are of deep sorrow.
To be continued. Next up: Tombstone Blues part X
———-
Jochen is a regular reviewer of Dylan’s work on Untold. His books are available via Amazon both in paperback and on Kindle:
We are approaching article 2000 on this site. You can find indexes to series linked under the image of Dylan at the top of the page and some relating to recent series on the home page.
Although no one gets paid for writing, publishing or editing Untold Dylan, it does cost us money to keep the site afloat, safe from hackers, n’er-do-wells etc. We never ask for donations, and we try to survive on the income from our advertisers, so if you enjoy Untold Dylan, and you’ve got an ad blocker, could I beg you to turn it off while here. I’m not asking you to click on ads for the sake of it, but at least allow us to add one more to the number of people who see the full page including the adverts. Thanks.
As for the writing, Untold Dylan is written by people who want to write for Untold Dylan. We welcome articles, contributions and ideas from all our readers. Although no one gets paid, if you are published here, your work will be read by a fairly large number of people across the world, ranging from fans to academics. If you have an idea, or a finished piece send it as a Word file to Tony@schools.co.uk with a note saying that it is for publication on Untold Dylan.
We also have a very lively discussion group “Untold Dylan” on Facebook with around 8500 active members. Just type the phrase “Untold Dylan” in, on your Facebook page or follow this link And because we don’t do political debates on our Facebook group there is a separate group for debating Bob Dylan’s politics – Icicles Hanging Down
Note from the publisher: if you are outside the UK you might find one or more of these videos unavailable in your country. If so, it is always worth going onto your search engine of choice and simply typing in the details of the video (eg Series of Dreams, Di Gregori) and it might come up. I can’t guarantee it, but it happens quite often.
———–
by Geoffrey Morrow
I thought I’d get in touch with you after many years of enjoying your vast and enduring
enthusiasm for someone I’ve also always greatly admired since my own mid-teenage
years in 1964-65.
Like many people, besides the music, I’ve long been interested in the visual
minutiae of all things Dylan and I thought I would provide you with some facts that
might interest you, by giving you а little, perhaps new, background information
regarding what is considered to be by many of us the best authorized video made for
а song in BD’s vast catalogue; А Series of Dreams.
The official directorship of the video has always been given to the then LA-based Miert Avis, who, at the time, worked for the newly instigated Santa Monica-based wing of Dublin’s Windmill Lane recording and production studios.
While the production was in fact under his directorship and guidance, I’ve always felt that the much more significant contribution to the project was provided by my old friend Charlie Whisker, whose early and newly absorbed (1990) computer animation skills and personal art imagery suffuse the entire video.
I understand that this is all a bit old, but I still imagine that you and the team there might be interested in some of the background details of this production being fleshed out а little, with information on how the vibrantly interconnected imagery came about.
First a little background about Charlie’s and my long friendship and my subsequent
association with him on this project. We met while attending art college in Belfast from
1966 to1970. We both studied painting there and have continued to be connected to
the art world both as painters, and in my case, predominantly in the art conservation
side of things.
Charlie has lived for extended periods in London, California and Ireland where he still is а well known and highly regarded artist, unfortunately now in the descending grip of early on-set dementia. In а way this awful fact over the last 6-8 years has instigated the sending of this to you. I would like more people to know of both his own art and his important contribution to the world of BD studies that still resonates for many of us through this one magnificent work of video art, before he slips further away.
We’ve both spent time in BD’s company in the past and the possibility of somehow contributing even in а very small way to his art (that presented itself when Windmill Lane Santa Monica won the job of making the Series of Dreams video in 1990-91) gave us both great happiness at the time and still does.
Charlie’s association with Windmill Lane Dublin is closely connected to both his and his ex-wife’s friendship with and the early beginnings of U2, who have recorded most of their records there. That’s а whole other story but directly connected to Charlie leaving the world of teaching painting in the Dublin art college, to his working at Windmill Lane West in Santa Monica as an artist and video animator.
In 1990 the team from Windmill Lane West was given access to BD for only а few hours
in New York City in which to shoot some useful film footage but very little of that (the B&W meat market scenes where Dylan points and laughs at а sign saying ‘Т-Bone
Automotive services’) survives in the completed video.
From that afternoon’s shoot, those few seconds were all that was considered in any way usable. It seemed to have been а calamitously blown opportunity at the time and the dilemma for the team was how now to save the project and make а video worthy of the soon to be released ‘new’ song that would be the first track of what was to be the very first triple disc of the still continuing Bootleg Series of releases.
When back in Santa Monica, all turned to Charlie in the hope that he could conjure something out of almost nothing using previously existing footage for what was considered a very important project by the whole team. That’s when Charlie called me here in Ottawa and we began to discuss what might be possible.
Sony were happy to allow the use of just about anything they had as far as already available and unreleased film footage was concerned. This led to the previously unreleased Eat the Document being provided, along with some other bits and pieces of film. It was а scramble but it was something to be going along with and sections of film that could be coordinated and aligned with the lyric of the song began to be selected out of the film imagery they had given permission to use.
There was still а lot of song/sound running time to be somehow filled-in with relevant
visuals that would enhance the quite different and strange world being called into
vision by the lyric and slightly ominous sound of the song’s trajectory and thrust.
When Avis gave Charlie permission to go for anything he could put together, further discussions began to form into what would result in the final flow of film imagery, photographs and hand-written words in the completed video. Much of the painted or drawn background imagery (apart from well known artworks by famous painters such as Bosch or Piranesi etc.) is taken directly from Charlie’s own artwork, mostly seen as the backdrop to animated sequences in the final video.
Among photographs of our collective heroes such as Rimbaud, Lenny Bruce and Dylan Thomas were several photographs inserted into existing footage that were taken by either Charlie or myself at various times over the course of our lives. The one of Charlie sitting directly across the street from Umberto’s Clam Bar in New York’s Little Italy (where Joey Gallo had been gunned down years earlier) I shot in 1987 while we were in town for а U2 concert at Madison Square Gardens. The same image, of his head only, repeats in the mirror behind the merging and distorting faces of BD and ‘the science student’ from Don’t Look Back а little later.
On top of this shot of Charlie’s head is an inscription resembling that seen in the convex mirror background of the famous Jan Van Eyck painting of the Arnolfini Wedding, on which Van Eyck has inscribed ‘I Jan Van Eyck painted this’ as а tribute to that wonderful work, except in the video it says, ‘I Charlie Whisker painted this’.
All of the varied written inscriptions seen throughout the sequences are in Charlie’s distinctive handwriting referring to various different things. Rimbaud’s poetry as an example can be seen referenced in the sequence of coloured vowels at the end of the video in а homage to his famous poem ‘Vowels’. We were having fun with all this of course.
It wasn’t until Charlie had completed the video and sent me а copy on VHS tape that I realized that he had also slipped an image of myself into the mix. In the longer train carriage sequence about two thirds of the way in, where the 1965 BD is peering out the window from within а British train carriage from Dont Look Back footage, the outside passing landscape has been altered and changed into passing images of various things and people; from а Piranesi drawing of а dungeon to Napoleon on а White horse and Jack Kerouac smoking а cigarette.
I was delighted to find there too was a brief and fleeting image of myself passing by, holding at arm’s-length а fabricated (in being computer-drawn rather than actual) but rather real looking poisonous monitor lizard by the tail. He had taken аn earlier photograph of me from 1977 that I’d sent to him among others just after my wife and I had arrived here in Ottawa from London (where he still lived at the time) and which he had then reused all those years later for this purpose.
In short, he had not been able to resist the opportunity of embedding the both of us in this video and to this day I still get an enormous kick out of being seen in the thing for about one second. If I was а BD aficionado who loved this video at the time and still possibly did, I know I would have studied every frame of its packed overflow of references and wondered who the hell is that passing by just after Jack Kerouac and would’ve been stumped. I just thought you’d like to have this (vast and highly important) mystery revealed. So now you know. As I say, we were having а bit of fun with it.
The bald chap (Charlie) and the other one with the hair (me) will be travelling the universe
forever with our greatest hero and now lifelong inspiration. What a trip for us it’s been.
So, as I reach the age of 72 and whose daily routine still includes checking out your
wonderful website, I’d simply like to thank you for all you do by providing this little
snippet of obscure information for your files. If you would like to hear about the
afternoon I spent hanging out with BD and his crew in the cinema he later appeared in
that same night on May 6th 1966 in Belfast (smuggled in by the dear but quite recently
departed Mickey Jones, who admonished me as we passed through the stage door “Don’t tell anyone I brought you in here, OK”.) I’d be glad to relay the strange and awesome afternoon I had there observing and listening quietly from the side-lines for those few hours that are still seared into my memory of that unique day. Just let me
know. I’d be happy to do so.
As а skinny 17-year-old grammar school kid with a sketch pad under his arm and а determination to draw my God-like hero, I was close to both а nerve wracking kind of heaven and my first true out-of-body experience. And unfortunately as it turned out, and to my dying shame, towards the end of that afternoon, to be the recipient of Bob and his band’s (later The Band) quite terrifyingly confrontational displeasure. They didn’t even know I had been there for those few hours.
The concert that night knocked all new doubts (as to what strange behaviour by mere
mortals I had witnessed over that afternoon) out of my mind as I tried to absorb this new
and utterly visually altered version of an artist who was so fаr ahead of his UK audience back then as to be barely recognizable.
I hope that you and anyone else reading this will check out Charlie Whisker’s paintings
on-line and think of his wonderful contribution to this still riveting video as he himself
slips further into an uncertain future in Dublin.
Thanks for your attention and all your great work.
Geoffrey Morrow
Untold Dylan
We are approaching article 2000 on this site. You can find indexes to series linked under the image of Dylan at the top of the page and some relating to recent series on the home page.
Although no one gets paid for writing, publishing or editing Untold Dylan, it does cost us money to keep the site afloat, safe from hackers, n’er-do-wells etc. We never ask for donations, and we try to survive on the income from our advertisers, so if you enjoy Untold Dylan, and you’ve got an ad blocker, could I beg you to turn it off while here. I’m not asking you to click on ads for the sake of it, but at least allow us to add one more to the number of people who see the full page including the adverts. Thanks.
As for the writing, Untold Dylan is written by people who want to write for Untold Dylan. We welcome articles, contributions and ideas from all our readers. Although no one gets paid, if you are published here, your work will be read by a fairly large number of people across the world, ranging from fans to academics. If you have an idea, or a finished piece send it as a Word file to Tony@schools.co.uk with a note saying that it is for publication on Untold Dylan.
We also have a very lively discussion group “Untold Dylan” on Facebook with around 8500 active members. Just type the phrase “Untold Dylan” in, on your Facebook page or follow this link And because we don’t do political debates on our Facebook group there is a separate group for debating Bob Dylan’s politics – Icicles Hanging Down
This is article number 30 in our series reviewing the art work of Dylan’s albums. An index to all the articles can be found here.
Released: October 19,1970
Photographer Len Siegler
Art-director ?
Bob Dylan & Victoria Spivey
“I think one of the best records that I’ve ever been a part of was the record made with Big Joe Williams and Victoria Spivey. Now that’s a record that I hear from time to time and I don’t mind listening to it. It amazes me that I was there and had done that.”
Bob Dylan , Rolling Stone Magazine, November 22, 2001
Barely three months after Self Portrait, there is a new Dylan album in the shops. The press regards the title as telling: New Morning, a new start after the double album that has been reviewed as the nadir in the career of the great singer-songwriter.
Obviously, the man himself denies such a thing. Regarding that title, he reminisces in his Chronicles, Volume One (2004): “[The producer Bob] Johnston had asked me earlier, “What do you think you’ll call this record? ” Titles! Everyone likes titles. There’s a lot to be said in a title. I didn’t know, though, and hadn’t thought about it. […] I had just heard the song “New Morning” on the playback and thought it had come out pretty good. New Morning might make a good title, I thought and then I said it to Johnston. “Man, you were reading my mind!” That’ll put them in the palm of your hand – they’ll have to take one of them mind-training courses that you do while you sleep to get the meaning of that.”
Dylan immediately adds that he already had an idea for the cover: “…a photo of myself and Victoria Spivey. […] I knew that this photo would be on the cover before I recorded the songs. Maybe I was even making this record because I had the cover in mind and needed something to go into the sleeve.”
Said photo was taken on March 2, 1962, in the Cue Recording Studio in New York. That day Dylan was invited to play harmonica during a session of Victoria Spivey with Big Joe Williams.
Victoria Spivey is a singer who began her career in 1918, at the tender age of 12, and enjoyed success in the vaudeville and blues genres. Unlike many other musicians, the Great Depression didn’t stop her career, as she had moved on by then to musical films and stage shows. Spivey retired from show business in 1951.
Towards the end of that decade however, jazz historian Len Kunstadt lured her out of retirement and gave her a regular column in his Record Research magazine, entitled “Blues Is My Business”.
Kunstadt became her agent, manager and her husband. To give her career a second wind they founded their own record label: Spivey Records. The aim was to regularly release albums by Spivey, each time collaborating with different musicians.
One of the first sessions was in March 1962. Big Joe Williams, who happened to be in town for a two week stint in Gerde’s Folk City, was invited. The Delta blues singer/guitarist is probably best known for popularizing the blues songs “Baby Please Don’t Go” (1935) and “Crawlin ‘King Snake” (1941).
Big Joe brings a guest to the studio: a young aspiring folk singer he met in October 1961, when playing a previous series of gigs at Gerde’s. During that two week period, Bob Dylan frequently sat in to accompany the singer-guitar player on harp (harmonica) and backing vocals. By the end, they were billed as Big Bill and Little Joe. The two got on so well, that Dylan states in his Chronicles Volume One: “I´d played with Big Joe Williams when I was just a kid.”
The album Dylan so fondly remembers is Three Kings and a Queen, released on Spivey Records in October 1964. The queen of course is Victoria, while the three kings are guitarist Lonnie Johnson, pianist Roosevelt Sykes and Big Joe Williams. Dylan can be heard playing harp behind Williams driving guitar and raspy vocals on “Sitting on Top of the World” and “Wichita”.
During the session two photographs were made: the one, Dylan wanted on the cover of New Morning eight years after the fact, portrays a confident Bob standing with his right hand on Williams’ beat up Supertone guitar (converted into a 9 string). Sitting next to him, in front of the piano is Victoria Spivey, beaming up at the young man, looking immensely pleased.
There’s a second photograph, in which all those present are shown: Dylan, Spivey, Kunstadt and Williams.
New Morning
Visit my website https://vinyl-records.nl for complete album information and thousands of album cover photos
In late Summer 1970, plans have obviously changed, a photo of Bob Dylan face is made for the front sleeve of the New Morning album. The bearded Dylan gives the listener a serene and determined look.
The photo is printed in sepia and edged with a pale brown-orange-ish frame. For the third time in a row, both the title and the name of the performer are missing on the front of the album’s sleeve. Perhaps Dylan just wants to give his fans a hard time?
In the booklet of The Bootleg Series, Vol 1-3 (1991) in a very similar photo is printed,but this time in colour. So we learn that the vest he is wearing is blue and white striped.
But there’s more. When the 1962 photo of young Bob on the back is mirrored and put next to the 1970 Bob of the New Morning sleeve, there’s a similarity that simply cannot be coincidence. Exactly the same angle of the face is used and exactly the same look on both faces.
Len Siegler?
Who wielded the camera is unclear. Dylanologist Michael Gray mentions Len Siegler as a photographer in his Bob Dylan Encyclopedia (2006), but notes that the original remained in the possession of Len Kunstadt for many years. That also matches the credits on the cover, where only Siegler is credited as photographer.
In his series of articles in The Telegraph “Looking Up Dylan’s Sleeves” (1995-1996), Rod MacBeath calls Len Siegler a “Columbia staff photographer.” There is no further information at all about the man. Specialized sites such as Allmusic and Discogs do not mention any other album sleeve to which Siegler has contributed – remarkable for a staff photographer of a record company, isn’t it? It seems like Siegler has only taken a handful of photos in his entire career, all of Bob Dylan.
In fact, in the book accompanying The Bootleg Series, Vol. 10 – Another Self Portrait (1969-1971) there’s about a dozen photographs related to Len Siegler – and yet his name is not mentioned anywhere.
This lead me to think that perhaps Len Sigler and Len Kunstadt are one and the same. In November 2018, I mailed this suggestion to Alan Fraser (from the beautiful site Searching for a Gem). After consulting Rod MacBeath (The Bridge), the following text appeared on the New Morning entry on Searching for a Gem: “[…] This leads Rod MacBeath to conclude that, because the photos from the Aug or Sep 1970 session are the only ones known to be credited to Len Siegler, he and Len Kunstadt are the same person!
I recently put the question regarding Len Kunstadt/Siegler to the spiveyrecords.com blog and got a very friendly mail back from Lisa Weiner. “I am sorry that I do not have any insight for you. Len Kunstadt was my uncle. I have never heard him referred to as Len Siegler, and there is no Siegler in my extended family. That said, Lenny certainly did things his own way, so it is possible that he decided to use another name for some reason — I do not know.”
So, I’m afraid it remains an unsolved mystery who Len Siegler is.
Notes
The New Morning pressing on Deutsche Schalplatten has a different back cover, with the photo showing Bob and Victoria replaced with one from the mid-1960s of Dylan alone at the piano.
There’s one more photo of Bob and Victoria together. It’s made by Rowland Sherman, at the Newport Folk Festival in 1963, where they both appeared.
In her column for the April 1965 issue of Record Research, Spivey wrote about Bob Dylan the heading ‘Luck Is A Fortune!’:
‘If you live long enough your luck is bound to change. I was just thinking about little BOB DYLAN. The years flashed back to 1961 when I first met him at Gerde’s Folk City in Greenwich Village, New York City. He was the sweetest kid you would ever want to meet. Just a bundle of nervous energy. He would say Moms, this Moms, that Moms, always trying to get my attention, He was a doll. I was so proud of him then because he really had some talent which was just ready to explode. And did it! Just a couple of years later he was on his way to becoming a world idol in his field.
‘
Visit my website https://vinyl-records.nl for complete album information and thousands of album cover photos
Speaking about idols! Bob used to tell us all about his childhood and how he used to get next to the Chicago blues people. He had an idol too, among others, and he was none other than the great country blues singer, Big Joe Williams. A dream came true for Bob when Big Joe was here in New York for a Gerde’s engagement. Bob knew about my little record company SPIVEY and my plans to record Big Joe, and he wanted “in” too. What a sight as little Bob was carrying Big Joe’s unusual guitar to the studio! And did they play well together! Like they were together for 50 years! “Come On Big Joe Little Junior, Play your harp.” That’s the way Big Joe proudly gave Bob the cue to “take off” on one of the titles. Yes, this was Bob before Dame fortune was to reward him for his great talent.
‘When I see him now he still gives me that big baby kiss and hug. He’s still the same Little boy to me and I am so happy for him. On a recent Les Crane TV show Bob was simply great. I believe he could become a great comedian in addition to his writing and singing.
‘So Bob! keep up the good work and stay the same young man you were in 1961, and you won’t have to look back.’
Untold Dylan
We are approaching article 2000 on this site. You can find indexes to series linked under the image of Dylan at the top of the page and some relating to recent series on the home page.
Although no one gets paid for writing, publishing or editing Untold Dylan, it does cost us money to keep the site afloat, safe from hackers, n’er-do-wells etc. We never ask for donations, and we try to survive on the income from our advertisers, so if you enjoy Untold Dylan, and you’ve got an ad blocker, could I beg you to turn it off while here. I’m not asking you to click on ads for the sake of it, but at least allow us to add one more to the number of people who see the full page including the adverts. Thanks.
As for the writing, Untold Dylan is written by people who want to write for Untold Dylan. We welcome articles, contributions and ideas from all our readers. Although no one gets paid, if you are published here, your work will be read by a fairly large number of people across the world, ranging from fans to academics. If you have an idea, or a finished piece send it as a Word file to Tony@schools.co.uk with a note saying that it is for publication on Untold Dylan.
We also have a very lively discussion group “Untold Dylan” on Facebook with around 8500 active members. Just type the phrase “Untold Dylan” in, on your Facebook page or follow this link And because we don’t do political debates on our Facebook group there is a separate group for debating Bob Dylan’s politics – Icicles Hanging Down
The news that Bob Dylan was selling the copyright of 600 of his songs to Universal Music reminds me of a story I read somewhere about how assiduous the young Dylan was in amassing that intellectual property. Dylan would haunt the folk music shows, soak up melody lines and arrangements by such groups as the Clancy Brothers, write his own (brilliant) lyrics to the melodies and rush off to get them copyrighted.
The Clancy Brothers would find that some song they’d been singing now, technically at least, belonged to Bob Dylan.
From that time on, while he did some crazy things like giving songs away, in the main he jealously protected his intellectual property. He was fine giving permission for the hundreds of cover versions of his songs, but made it very difficult for writers who wanted to quote him, other than in critical works or blogsites such as Untold Dylan.
He was dead set against bootleggers ripping off his performances, and for many years there was constant battle between the bootleggers and the Web Sheriff on You Tube – an ongoing war, and a losing one, against copyright infringement. Videos would appear and disappear and reappear again. This still goes on to some extent, despite the flood of material onto You Tube.
Looking at this history, we see a Dylan very concerned with the integrity of his property, with a fierce sense of propriety when it came to his songs.
Now he’s cashing out. Or as some prefer to see it, selling out to the big musical corporates. Not everybody is comfortable with that.
When the news came out, The Guardian newspaper somewhat gleefully commented: ‘The fact that he’s ceded control of how the songs are used might cause palpitations for a certain kind of Dylan nut. Will this Nobel prize winner’s hallowed oeuvre now be allowed to play on the soundtrack of anything, no matter how inappropriate, so long as someone stumps up the requisite cash?’ (Bob Dylan’s rights sale all part of his freewheelin’ approach to business, Dec 7).
Judas! I can hear someone yelling from the middle rows.
Not happy with this sideswipe at Dylan’s admirers, The Guardian goes on to list all the adverts Dylan has been in, or his songs have been in, and comments, ‘If you look online, you can find Dylan fans tying themselves in knots attempting to square his fondness for adverts with their image of him as an artist above petty materialistic concerns but, in truth, after a tricky start – he dissolved his relationship with his 1960s manager Albert Grossman after discovering that his hastily signed contract entitled Grossman to 50% of his song publishing rights – he’s become impressively savvy when it comes to business.’
What this article doesn’t say is that all the young Dylan had to do was look around at the way managers treated Elvis Presley and Jimmy Hendrix, to get the picture.
However, fair to say there has been some agonizing on the Untold Dylan Facebook page, with wounded declarations that ‘these are his songs and he can do what he likes with them.’
I have no intention of ‘tying myself in knots’ defending the Great Cashout. My approach to Dylan has been solely through the songs and the way he sings them, not because of some idealized image I have projected onto him. I love and admire the songs and performances, not Dylan, whoever he may be. It is the songs and the performances that show the artist, not what he does with his money or how he disposes of his property.
Famously, Shakespeare left their marriage bed to his wife, specified in his will (but nothing else, it seems) and people have expressed surprise that the great artist who had plumbed the depths of tragedy and scaled the heights of comedy should be so downright bourgeois in his worldly ambitions. People also expressed amazement that Kahlil Gibran, the great mystic poet and author of that best seller, The Prophet, should die of alcoholism and despair. I just wrote The Prophet, Gibran complained, I wasn’t the prophet. The famous Chilean Marxist poet, Pablo Neruda, who identified himself with the working man, also owned several large houses. And so on and so on.
We may build up expectations of artists because of their work, and our response to it. Arguably, this has been made worse by the ‘follow’ culture, but it’s all about projection rather than hypocrisy.
I have only one thought to offer here. I’m going to suggest, with a full awareness that this is mere speculation, that the Great Cashout may have a spiritual function or dimension. I see it not so much as a sellout but a divestment. Property can become a burden. Fussing over it, defending it from rip-off merchants, hoarding it, growing it, all this activity can become wearisome.
By renouncing that which has occupied his whole working life, the 79 year old Dylan takes a step towards freeing himself from the material concerns of the world, an important step in preparation for death.
‘Three miles north of Purgatory
one step from the great beyond ’
he sings in Crossing the Rubicon. At times during his last album, Rough and Rowdy Ways, we get the feeling that he is entering some intermediary zone between life and death, and I suspect you can’t enter that zone carrying your property on your back.
Life is enacted in three parts, and the third part is a period of preparation for death and ‘the great beyond’. To some extent I want to evoke the spiritual journey evident in Dylan’s evolution as an artist. Christianity is not the only religion that requires us to ‘lay our burden down’, but it comes to mind where Dylan is concerned.
I am suggesting that it is the renunciation of ownership that lies behind the Great Cashout. The Great Cashout is, at the same time, the Great Disowning. The Great Letting Go. We could push this further and suggest that, as the spirit approaches the Great Beyond, ownership becomes meaningless. You can’t own the wind.
Am I conveniently forgetting the cool $300 million now in the singer’s back pocket? Hardly. Cash is not property. Cash is more ephemeral than a song. Cash can turn to ashes in your mouth if you have to sell that which is most precious to you to get it. But look at it this way – Dylan is now finally free. He is no longer ‘Dylan’, owner operator of his own intellectual property. Now he has no property; he is no longer Bob Dylan in the sense we knew. He has effected a separation from his life and work. He is already a shade.
One final point. The Great Cashout is also the Great Dispersal. All those amazing lyrics, which grew out of the popular culture of which he was a part, have now returned to the cultural cauldron from which they arose, the cultural cauldron celebrated in ‘I Contain Multitudes’ and ‘Murder Most Foul’. Dust returns to dust. Since Universal Music can now slice and dice, mix and remix his words, use them as they want to sell what they can, the very sense of a ‘Bob Dylan song’ may become problematic as time goes on.
Picture a man in a bar, alone. As he watches a woman leave, some mood music swells. A male voiceover says, in an insinuating voice, ‘Ain’t it just like the night to play tricks when you’re trying to be so quiet?’ The man grins ruefully. The camera focuses on a bottle of whisky: Heaven’s Door, the most expensive on the shelf.
‘But life sure has its compensations,’ the voiceover says. ‘And you ain’t goin nowhere.’
Ain’t that the truth?.
Bob who?
Untold Dylan
We are approaching article 2000 on this site. You can find indexes to series linked under the image of Dylan at the top of the page and some relating to recent series on the home page.
Although no one gets paid for writing, publishing or editing Untold Dylan, it does cost us money to keep the site afloat, safe from hackers, n’er-do-wells etc. We never ask for donations, and we try to survive on the income from our advertisers, so if you enjoy Untold Dylan, and you’ve got an ad blocker, could I beg you to turn it off while here. I’m not asking you to click on ads for the sake of it, but at least allow us to add one more to the number of people who see the full page including the adverts. Thanks.
As for the writing, Untold Dylan is written by people who want to write for Untold Dylan. We welcome articles, contributions and ideas from all our readers. Although no one gets paid, if you are published here, your work will be read by a fairly large number of people across the world, ranging from fans to academics. If you have an idea, or a finished piece send it as a Word file to Tony@schools.co.uk with a note saying that it is for publication on Untold Dylan.
We also have a very lively discussion group “Untold Dylan” on Facebook with around 8500 active members. Just type the phrase “Untold Dylan” in, on your Facebook page or follow this link And because we don’t do political debates on our Facebook group there is a separate group for debating Bob Dylan’s politics – Icicles Hanging Down
The geometry of innocent flesh on the bone
Causes Galileo’s math book to get thrown
At Delilah who sits worthlessly alone
But the tears on her cheeks are from laughter
In 2012 Monty Norman explains one more time, in the BBC’s The One Show, how he came up with the legendary theme tune for the James Bond films, probably the most recognisable tune in cinema history. Producer Cubby Broccoli happened to hear his music for the flop musical Belle or The Ballad Of Dr. Crippen (1961), is impressed and remembers Monty’s name when he has bought the film rights of Ian Fleming’s James Bond novels shortly afterwards. Monty is actually too busy with two stage shows at the time, but Broccoli makes him an offer he can’t refuse: a paid holiday for him and his wife in Jamaica, where the filming takes place, “to find inspiration”.
“Well, that was the clincher for me! I thought, even if Dr. No turns out to be a stinker at least we’d have sun, sea and sand to show for it!”
He finds inspiration indeed. Not so much for the theme music, but still for all the other music. “Underneath The Mango Tree”, for example, the song Honey Rider sings, Ursula Andress in her unforgettable opening scene, like an Aphrodite rising from the sea.
Monty finds the well-known motif (dum diddy dum dum dum) in, as he puts it himself, his bottom drawer; it is an re-working of a piece he had recently written for a musical adaptation of V.S. Naipaul’s A House for Mr. Biswas. The musical was shelved, but the song “Good Sign, Bad Sign”, an Indian-inspired song with sitar accompaniment, is too good to leave in the drawer.
“I thought: what would happen if I split the notes. So I went … [plays the same notes ‘split’]… and immediately, the moment I did that, I realized that this was what I was looking for. His sexiness, his mystery, his ruthlessness – it’s all there in a few notes.”
The young John Barry is recruited as arranger, which has some consequences. Barry provides the rather thin motif not only with a jazz arrangement, but also with countermelodies and ostinati, and thinks, rightly or wrongly, that the music should at least partly be in his name. Monty thinks otherwise, and the judge agrees with him, twice even (most recently in 2001).
Barry’s claim does have some ground, though (the chord progression of the opening is at least as well known and distinctive as the guitar motif), but his point loses weight when listening to “Softly”, a piece Henry Mancini wrote two years earlier for the TV series Mr. Lucky (1959) with an identical chord progression. And Mancini, in turn, copies it from Guy Mitchell’s hit “Ninety Nine Years (Dead Or Alive)” from 1956 – the simple, ominous chord progression is apparently very inspiring.
Apart from being a primal model for the James Bond theme, “Ninety Nine Years (Dead Or Alive)” has a second merit, of which we hear an echo in Dylan’s “Tombstone Blues”. Mitchell’s song (written by regular purveyor to his majesty Elvis, by Sid Wayne) is the first lyric with this rather recent expression:
Now today I’m thinking ’bout that courtroom trial
I was so sad, baby, saw you weepin’ like a child
Ah, the jury found me guilty, wouldn't listen to my plea
And the judge said Mercy, threw the book at me
“Throwing the book at someone”, as a metaphor for sentencing to the maximum sentence, is an expression that has, oddly enough, only existed since 1932. The few songs that use the expression after Guy Mitchell’s hit do safely stick to the same legal connotation (Oscar Browns hilarious “But I Was Cool”, 2Pacs “When I Get Free”). But a playful Dylan in top form – of course – freely and merrily misuses it: Galileo’s book, probably Il Saggiatore from 1623, or else Discorsi e Dimostrazioni Matematiche from 1638, gets thrown at Delilah – the lawbook is turned into a mathematics book and is thrown not metaphorically, but really, physically, at a notorious nasty lass.
The image offers an inexhaustible number of possibilities for interpretation, which are gratefully used. Polizotti suspects something like an unholy alliance of the scientific and the spiritual, Andrew Brown discovers something with God’s justice and his mercy and the beauty of “perfectly arranged and balanced fixed forces” (in The Independent, 4 October 1997), and actually only Robert Shelton in his No Direction Home has an eye for the poetry:
“One impudent image reminds us that Dylan’s control of language was absolute: The geometry of innocence flesh on the bone/Causes Galileo’s math book to get thrown.”
But there it is a little awkward that Shelton quotes exactly that one line with a spelling error as an example of “Dylan’s control of language”. Both in the studio and on stage, Dylan sings quite clearly “The geometry of innocent flesh on the bone”, which has indeed been spelled out erroneously as innocence since the first edition of the lyrics up to and including the official site. And Shelton has apparently also missed the wordplay with the expression throwing the book atsomeone. The thrust of his compliment, however, is to the point; this verse demonstrates the skill of a language artist.
Throwing the book may indeed trigger associations with Law, natural laws, mathematical laws, with Galileo, but the choice for that name nevertheless seems more a result of sound, of Dylan’s receptivity to the sound of the surrounding words rather than the meaning – the poet here dances with a succession of “e-o” sounds (geometry, innocent, flesh-on, the-bone, get-thrown) and in between a name like Galileo fits perfectly. Cleopatra could have done the same trick, but then it might have become too much of an extract of Burroughs’ Nova Express (in which Cleopatra passes by a few times). Napoleon has been used a few times too much already (in “Hero Blues”, in “On The Road Again” and in “Like A Rolling Stone”). And Romeo is reserved for “Desolation Row”, so: Galileo it shall be.
In that corner, in the corner of sound and rhythm rather than rhyme and reason, Delilah’s enigmatic, absurd “sitting worthlessly alone” should probably be placed too. After all, content-wise the unusual combination of words would imply that there is also such a thing as “sitting worthwhile alone” or “sitting valuably alone”, and that this darn, unruly girl cannot even show the decency of sitting worthfully.
No, “it’s the sound and the words. Words don’t interfere with it,” as Dylan later tries to explain to interviewer Ron Rosenbaum (Playboy interview 1978).
In the meantime, James Bond throws knives, cushions, grenades, villains, shoes, snakes, punches, bowler hats, flames and attractive ladies all through the sixties and beyond, but never a book. Least of all a math book.
To be continued. Next up: Tombstone Blues part IX
——-
Jochen is a regular reviewer of Dylan’s work on Untold. His books are available via Amazon both in paperback and on Kindle:
We are approaching article 2000 on this site. You can find indexes to series linked under the image of Dylan at the top of the page and some relating to recent series on the home page.
Although no one gets paid for writing, publishing or editing Untold Dylan, it does cost us money to keep the site afloat, safe from hackers, n’er-do-wells etc. We never ask for donations, and we try to survive on the income from our advertisers, so if you enjoy Untold Dylan, and you’ve got an ad blocker, could I beg you to turn it off while here. I’m not asking you to click on ads for the sake of it, but at least allow us to add one more to the number of people who see the full page including the adverts. Thanks.
As for the writing, Untold Dylan is written by people who want to write for Untold Dylan. We welcome articles, contributions and ideas from all our readers. Although no one gets paid, if you are published here, your work will be read by a fairly large number of people across the world, ranging from fans to academics. If you have an idea, or a finished piece send it as a Word file to Tony@schools.co.uk with a note saying that it is for publication on Untold Dylan.
We also have a very lively discussion group “Untold Dylan” on Facebook with around 8500 active members. Just type the phrase “Untold Dylan” in, on your Facebook page or follow this link And because we don’t do political debates on our Facebook group there is a separate group for debating Bob Dylan’s politics – Icicles Hanging Down
This is part 25 of “All Directions at Once” which attempts to look at Dylan’s songwriting in a way that is slightly different from that used by other commentators: creativity as a wave form.
The thesis behind this series of articles is that Bob’s creative life can be best understood seen as a wave. From the outset he rode quickly to the crest of a creative wave and stayed surfing along it from 1962 to 1966 with the most incredible creativity amounting to 138 songs in five years – many of which became absolute classics.
Then with the muse still upon him, but a desire to hide away Dylan retreated to the Basement, thereafter seemingly writing a new album only because of a contract (1967) rather than because of a desire to write. The fact that the album (JWH) is so interesting lyrically and musically tells us (as if we didn’t know) what an extraordinary talent we were beholding. He could be stunningly amazing, even when hardly trying.
On the other hand, the fact that two country-style songs that are utterly different from everything else on the album and which had no connection with the themes of the album, were simply bolted on the end, does suggest that Bob was not giving any thought to the overall artistic feel of the LP.
That feeling of a lack of interest, with the wave now on a serious down curve, is enhanced by the fact that he then all but abandoned writing (1968), returned to a spot less-demanding (for a composer) country music (1969), hid away in the mountains and completed another contractual obligation (1970), took it really easy and tried out a couple of nifty ideas (1971), took it even easier and came up with one memorable work (1972). The curve of the wave had up and down ripples in it, but basically it was operating at a much lower level than in the earlier years of Dylan’s initial triumphs.
But then the wave started on a new upturn, and Bob settled down to some serious writing, which just got better and better as time went by, (1973), before putting his first tour since 1966, (in 1974).
So self-evidently he was by that time, re-energised. He had written some seriously powerful pieces in 1973, and shown himself (if he needed showing) that he could still sell out the biggest auditoria many times over.
Now all that would be needed was an album that brought all that new found energy and a new style of writing, and which successfully put it in one box. New songs that took both the musical and lyrical experiments of Planet Waves a step further and made them not just new songs, nor just new songs in a new form, but beyond that new songs in a new form that the fans would want him to play instead of endless re-runs of Tambourine Man. After all there was no much point writing “You Angel You”, “On a night like this,” “Tough Mama,” “Dirge,” and “Wedding Song” which broke new boundaries, if no one really wanted to hear them at a live show.
My view is that with his creative wave rising, and emboldened by this new way of thinking, and those final Planet Waves compositions that had emerged in the highly energised works of 1973, Bob had the confidence to plot a new album reflecting a new vision through a new type of music.
In his earlier mega-productive period 1962-6 Dylan wrote the songs which came out of the traditions of folk music that he had learned along the way. These had morphed into the famous protest songs, and then headed onto creating his own new types of lyrics: the songs of disdain, the surreal visions and the Dadaesque pieces, followed by his unique use of Kafkaesque stories which came out of this.
Now, I believe, he was under no pressure, he could consider the options, look at the landscape, consider the form, and when ready, start writing. Everything he needed was there. He didn’t need to start reading Kafka again. He didn’t have to think how he could write songs about a chance encounter in a new way, or reconsider how to present a rambling love affair over time. He knew.
The format he chose for his first attempt (or at least the first attempt that we know of) merged the writing of a story from the epic ballad of centuries gone by, with Kafka’s world where things don’t always make sense. The not-making-sense side was toned down a lot from that experienced in the JWH songs, but it was still there; songs at the opposite end of the lyrical spectrum from “New Morning”.
What Dylan did was reign back the craziness that we found in “The Drifter’s Escape” where absolutely nothing makes sense (as in, where on earth did that nurse come from?), but still keep a certain haziness within the opening song. This time the song would make more sense, although not so much that no one would mind if the last verse was missed out from the recording!
Lily, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts certainly did take us on a new journey which, I suspect, many of the people who have heard it would find hard to re-tell as a coherent tale without a lot of thinking. Indeed we are not helped by the fact that one of the four main characters, Big Jim, is not actually mentioned in the title, and no reason for this seems to be forthcoming.
Of course many have worked hard to tell us that the story is indeed coherent, and it may be, although the fact of that missing verse does suggest that this is not the point. That last verse reads, apparently,
Lily's arms were locked around the man she dearly loved to touch
She forgot all about the man she couldn't stand,
who hounded her so much
"I've missed you so," she said to him, and he felt she was sincere
But just beyond the door he felt jealousy and fear
Just another night in the life of the Jack of Hearts.
In fact the reality that the last verse is missing and that Dylan didn’t mind really does tell us that the story isn’t the point. The setting, the people, and the approach – that is the point; taking the old ballad form and not just transforming it into a more contemporary setting, but removing the notion of a complete story with a moral, and instead giving us a feel, a scene, some characters… – indeed some characters who, if we wish, can take on a life in our minds after the song is over. In this regard Dylan had bridged the past and the future. (But not the present, because no one else was writing songs like this at the moment Bob did.)
It was of course the technique that he was going to take much further forward in his next song, Tangled up in blue, but we can see the generation of the idea in the Jack of Hearts. In the first song of this series, time isn’t completely mixed up, it is more like the whole story isn’t fully drawn – but then given the lack of diamond mining in the USA nor is the notion of “the town’s only diamond mine”.
In short reality is being shifted. Not huge amounts, but enough. And now in the next song, this notion was taken a step further, wherein time itself shifts around in an extension of the most exciting of the John Wesley Harding pieces, wherein Dylan loses cause and effect.
Losing the inevitable arrow of time so that we are not quite sure where we are has been used by film makers for decades, why not in songs? Thus this is, I feel, Kafka with some of the more extreme edges removed.
Now for most song writers, the Jack of Hearts would be a masterpiece, a stand alone monument of this year and probably the next five years. But no, because next Dylan wrote the almighty Tangled up in blue.
“Tangled” is surely a song that is equal (at the very least) in merit and inventiveness to the ultimate classics of the 60s. A song I would put alongside “Desolation Row”, “Rolling Stone”, “Johanna”, “When the Ship Comes In”…. A song, seemingly out of nowhere, taking us into totally new ground, but in which is nothing of the kind…
For as I am trying to argue, it wasn’t out of nowhere – it was out of the experimentation that had come earlier, which led to Dylan seeing songs as a set of images and ideas wherein the storyline doesn’t have to be complete – or indeed doesn’t have to exist at all.
For me, “Tangled” really, really is that. It has that quality of “Visions” in which you can’t quite get a grip on who is where and what is what or indeed (and this I think was the new element), When is when. It really is an absolute ground-breaking event in the history of 20th century music.
But it was more than that, for it is a template for ceaseless modifications, thus in one swoop Dylan has created a new art form – a song that is designed to be changed and re-written as it goes.
Indeed if you listen to the performance on the album and compare the lyrics with those of the original the differences are tiny, but they are there and they feel deliberate. But why? It is a question worth asking as those changes evolved further over time.
For what it is worth, my view is that by making changing to the song time and again Dylan is adding to the fluidity of time; expressing the notion that nothing is fixed. Time is that dimension or sense of whatever we wish to call it, which cannot be touched, retrieved, manipulated or comprehended. It is there in the sense that new things happen as the clocks go around, but it is not there is the sense that our memories are unreliable and incomplete.
This is not a subject that few songwriters (if any) had really explored in popular music until this point, as far as I know, and it was an amazing project to take on. Of course, what we do know is that Bob has always been fascinated with changing melodies, lyrics, chords, time signatures – in fact everything in a popular song. But this was different, this was telling us that the very ground on which we stand, on which we base our lives and our determination of who we are, is not solid. It is fluid.
Such a vision emerges, I feel, from the eternally changing realms of Kafka wherein nothing is allowed to settle or make long term sense. We are there, we our own lives, but we can be knocked around in the slip stream and be unable to anything much about it.
The song in its original LP version is scattered with clues –
All the people we used to know
They’re an illusion to me now
and a little later
Don’t know how it all got started
I don’t know what they’re doin’ with their lives
Oh yes.
Untold Dylan
We are approaching article 2000 on this site. You can find indexes to series linked under the image of Dylan at the top of the page and some relating to recent series on the home page.
Although no one gets paid for writing, publishing or editing Untold Dylan, it does cost us money to keep the site afloat, safe from hackers, n’er-do-wells etc. We never ask for donations, and we try to survive on the income from our advertisers, so if you enjoy Untold Dylan, and you’ve got an ad blocker, could I beg you to turn it off while here. I’m not asking you to click on ads for the sake of it, but at least allow us to add one more to the number of people who see the full page including the adverts. Thanks.
As for the writing, Untold Dylan is written by people who want to write for Untold Dylan. We welcome articles, contributions and ideas from all our readers. Although no one gets paid, if you are published here, your work will be read by a fairly large number of people across the world, ranging from fans to academics. If you have an idea, or a finished piece send it as a Word file to Tony@schools.co.uk with a note saying that it is for publication on Untold Dylan.
We also have a very lively discussion group “Untold Dylan” on Facebook with around 8500 active members. Just type the phrase “Untold Dylan” in, on your Facebook page or follow this link And because we don’t do political debates on our Facebook group there is a separate group for debating Bob Dylan’s politics – Icicles Hanging Down
This article first appeared in Pop Matters and is reproduced by kind permission of the author.
Those of us who have followed the life and times of Bob Dylan understand that the only real through line he has ever had is his tenuous connection with the truth. From his first major performance in 1961 to today, Dylan has been everything and nothing to his fans. Blink and you’ll miss the cascade of personas: he’s singing at the 1963 March on Washington; three years later, after shedding the “unwashed phenomenon” folkie protest skin in favor of life as the ultimate rock star, he nearly loses his life in a motorcycle accident; Dylan as the country recluse follows for the next eight years; he re-emerges in 1974 as a loud stadium act with his old pals in The Band. Flash forward to 1978 (time has always been a subjective condition for Dylan, and Scorsese playfully twists it for his own purposes in Rolling Thunder Revue: A Bob Dylan Story and read this line from Street Legal. The album’s final song, “Where Are You Tonight (Journey Through Dark Heat)” gave words to what most of us had always understood and appreciated about Dylan:
The truth was obscure, too profound and too pure
To live it you have to explode.
In that last hour of need, we entirely agreed
Sacrifice was the code of the road.
Dylan’s connection with truth may be matched in importance by his working relationship with artistic collaborators, but even there, the stories are legendary about his aloof nature with musical partners. What’s true? Why does that matter? Look outside music and watch D. A. Pennebaker’s documentary Don’t Look Back (1967), where the cruel mercurial genius is on the threshold of transforming from his folk persona during a tour in England. Watch Todd Haynes’ brilliant 2007 fictional biopic I’m Not There, featuring Cate Blanchett as one of several Dylan characters wandering through his life in an alternate history. He leaves pieces of himself behind in all of these projects, even in his own Masked and Anonymous (2003). Whatever is to be made of Dylan has never been his to make.
Scorsese is the perfect partner for Dylan’s story. The Last Waltz (1978) featured Dylan stealing the show at the end of an all-star evening farewell tribute to the original and best configuration of the Band. Shot Thanksgiving night 1976, with the man in the midst of domestic turmoil and ready to segue into another version of himself. Scorsese’s 2005 documentary No Direction Home: Bob Dylan covered the explosion of his popularity right before, during, and after the electric era with a perfect selection of footage and contemporary talking head interviews. The film is comprehensive, reflective, and knowing. Dylan wanted to talk. His people knew that Scorsese was an informed music man who understood why and how to use Dylan’s music. The result is equal parts definitive historical record and some beautifully restored color footage that sets the record straight as to whether or not this is a man really is a “Judas” for “betraying” the cause of folk music.
Rolling Thunder Revue is a flat-out masterpiece that delivers on levels difficult to fully grasp with just one viewing. Dylan and Scorsese are having a laugh at the audience from beginning to end, but at no point is it laughter of contempt. This is the story of the first leg of a tour Dylan undertook from 30 October to 8 December 1975. It focuses on the East Coast and places like Plymouth and Lowell Massachusetts (paying tribute to the Pilgrims of Plymouth Rock and Jack Kerouac, respectively), Canada (picking up old friends Gordon Lightfoot and Joni Mitchell along the way), Connecticut, and a finalé in New York City to benefit imprisoned boxer Ruben “Hurricane” Carter. It was a carnival filled with shamans (poet Allen Ginsberg), playwrights (Sam Shepard), a folk goddess icon (Joan Baez), a glam rock guitar god formerly with David Bowie (Mick Ronson), and the debut of the now ubiquitous T-Bone Burnett.
For years, the legend of The Rolling Thunder Revue tour had been the subject of interpretations and accounts that varied wildly in their degree of legitimacy and pretension. Rolling Stone writer Larry “Ratso” Sloman’s 1978 memoir On the Road with Bob Dylan(Three Rivers Press, 2002) is sycophantic, informative, and fun. Shepard’s 1977 account, The Rolling Thunder Logbook(Viking, 1977), reads like a precious literary artifact from the time. Both men were on the tour and given various tasks. Shepard was taken on to provide scenarios for the film Dylan was making while on the tour, Renaldo and Clara. He didn’t sign on for the second leg of the tour when he saw that his aspirations weren’t being incorporated into Dylan’s unwieldy ambitions, and while Shepard’s book is not as heavy as it thinks it is, it contains moments that speak to what Scorsese and Dylan seem intent on expressing with this film:
“A strong recurring feeling I get from watching Dylan perform is the sense of him playing for Big Stakes… the repercussions of his art don’t have to be answered by him at all… Myth is a powerful medium because it talks to the emotions and not the head.” (Shepard, 63.)
This is the point we need to understand from the beginning of this film. It’s a story, a myth, a fabrication. There’s a reason Scorsese begins with the great Georges Méliès The Vanishing Lady (1896). It’s all a mirage. Dylan also tips his hat early in this film when he says, “If someone’s wearing a mask, he’s gonna tell you the truth.” At no point in contemporary interviews is Dylan wearing a mask. He’s clear-headed, and we can see deep into his famous “blue” eyes. The “lies” compound early in the contemporary talking-head interviews as we meet Stefan Van Dorp, an indignant auteur who claims throughout the film that he directed the original footage that was never used. Van Dorp is a character played by performance artist Martin Von Haselberg, half of the ’70s art duo the Kipper Kids, and longtime husband of Bette Midler, who also shows up early in the film in beautifully clear color footage with Dylan at Patti Smith at New York’s The Bitter End.
Any manufactured joke needs to sustain itself from beginning to end, and Van Dorp is a good foil for the main players here. Dylan recalls that he ate more than he should have. Scorsese manufactures other footage, like interviews with a since-deceased Shepard, to make it appear as if the references are to Van Dorp. Other put-ons include Paramount President Jim Gianopulos claiming he was the tour promoter. If the name of Tennessee Congressman Jack Tanner sounds familiar, it’s only because Tanner was the fictional character played by Michael Murphy in Tanner ’88, a mockumentary series written by political cartoonist Garry Trudeau and directed by Robert Altman. Other extended jokes that work quite well in this context involve Sharon Stone claiming she was 19 when Dylan met her backstage during the tour and invited her to join the troupe. Later, she recalls that he played her the then nearly decade-old “Just Like a Woman” and said he’d just written it for her. “She seemed old for her age,” Dylan deadpans.
As expected, especially for those of us who have followed him this far, Dylan flawlessly plays along. Actor Ronee Blakley claims Ginsberg was a father figure, and Dylan says he was anything but that. He claims he got the idea of painting his face white after seeing a Kiss concert in 1973 (more likely it was inspired by Marcel Carné’s 1946 film, Children of Paradise, Les enfants du paradis) What was the Rolling Thunder tour about? “I don’t have a clue,” he says. At another point, he notes: “Life is about creating yourself.” Asked if it was a successful tour, he concludes: “No, it wasn’t… not if you measure success in terms of profit… What remains… nothing… not one single thing-ashes.” He’s grizzled but not bewildered. Of his violinist Scarlet Rivera, with her long raven black air and painted face, he says: “She didn’t say much. She didn’t have to.”
Dylan continues, late in life, to be deferential to ex-lover Joan Baez during on-camera interviews, claiming they could harmonize in their sleep. As detailed in Don’t Look Back, Baez was invited to join Dylan’s tour of England with the expectation of a leading role only to eventually be marginalized and dismissed by the inner circle. She eventually chose to leave the tour. She notes here that all is forgiven when she hears him sing. Some of the footage involving them is almost heartbreaking in its purity and simple aspirations toward lofty art. Scorsese rescues some scenes from Dylan’s Renaldo and Clara. In one, Dylan and Baez stand by at a bar while in their mid-30s, reflecting on what would have been over a decade earlier, a marriage that could have happened, love that could have sustained.
Dylan performs here as a man on fire, possessed, and Scorsese beautifully places the footage in the context of a country trying to find its purpose, trying to understand its myths and legends in the Bicentennial era. “Isis” is an early showstopper, with Dylan matching prime Bowie for dances and theatrics (courtesy of, among others, playwright Jacques Levy). In “The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll”, his vocal cadence and the fire in his eyes are a perfect match FOR this hard-edged, electric version of a then 12-year-old song. In “When I Paint My Masterpiece”, Dylan appears in a Richard Nixon mask.
There’s a full performance of “A Hard Rain’s a-Gonna Fall” that will convince most that Dylan’s voice was the only one that could save America from itself. “One More Cup of Coffee (To the Valley Below)” recalls an encounter with a Roma gypsy musical celebration/carnival (another tall tale? another inspiration for the Revue? Possibly.) In more scenes taken from Renaldo and Clara, Ginsberg recites the grim “Kaddish” before a crowd of elderly Jewish women, followed by Dylan performing a cha-cha nightclub danceable version of “Simple Twist of Fate”, followed by a heartbreaking, more familiar version. All concepts of time, sincerity, and legitimacy quickly dissolve into each other.
This is a film about collaborations, unity, the power of community (Ginsberg implores the viewer to find community.) It’s also a film about being sincerely moved to tears. Indeed, as one performance draws to a close, footage closes in on one woman breaking down as she realizes this night of magic — at least for her — has ended.
Those looking for Mitchell at her beret-wearing hipster beatnik best will be understandably thrilled by a scene where Mitchell, Roger McGuinn, and Dylan are visiting Gordon Lightfoot in Montreal. Lightfoot sits in the background and watches the others work through “Coyote”, Mitchell’s song of/for/about the tour. Dylan and the troupe appear at a Tuscarora Indian Convention Hall to perform “The Ballad of Ira Hayes” before a small afternoon crowd looking along, almost distracted, at lunch tables. Scorsese also manages to get Dylan to talk about “Hurricane”, as we see footage of the cause that fueled part of this tour (and another scene from Renaldo and Clara where Dylan rushes to the CBS offices to get them quickly release the song). Ruben “Hurricane” Carter notes that Dylan always claimed he was searching for the Holy Grail, and Dylan concurs.
It’s important to note that the Scorsese of 1975 was probably the cinematic equivalent of Dylan at that time. While Dylan was over a decade into his career, Scorsese was still relatively early into his professional directorial life. He was about to make Taxi Driver (1976), his first brutal masterpiece and an uncompromising look at the state of the country in during the “Me” decade. They were both looking to deconstruct icons, shatter myths, and rebuild things in their own image while still honoring their predecessors.
Where Taxi Driver marked an artist who would take a long time to reveal his sense of humor, Rolling Thunder Revue: A Bob Dylan Story by Martin Scorsese is a cheeky delight from beginning to end. Scorsese and Dylan are the perfect comic co-collaborators. Scorsese wraps it up with an end credit scroll that matches any Marvel superhero film. It starts slowly, with a scroll of tour dates after this first leg of the tour, and by 1988, the start of what all but Dylan calls “The Never-ending Tour”, the dates don’t stop. It’s enough to make any viewer/listener/true believer remember another highlight from “Tangled up in Blue”. This version (one of the most famous scenes from Renaldo and Clara not used by Scorsese) has for years been a manifestation of the lightning Scorsese has finally managed to capture in a beautiful bottle.
“But me, I’m still on the road/ Headin’ for another joint.”
It doesn’t get any better than this.
Untold Dylan
This is article 1,968 on this site. You can find indexes to series linked under the image of Dylan at the top of the page and some relating to recent series on the home page.
Although no one gets paid for writing, publishing or editing Untold Dylan, it does cost us money to keep the site afloat, safe from hackers, n’er-do-wells etc. We never ask for donations, and we try to survive on the income from our advertisers, so if you enjoy Untold Dylan, and you’ve got an ad blocker, could I beg you to turn it off while here. I’m not asking you to click on ads for the sake of it, but at least allow us to add one more to the number of people who see the full page including the adverts. Thanks.
As for the writing, Untold Dylan is written by people who want to write for Untold Dylan. We welcome articles, contributions and ideas from all our readers. Although no one gets paid, if you are published here, your work will be read by a fairly large number of people across the world, ranging from fans to academics. If you have an idea, or a finished piece send it as a Word file to Tony@schools.co.uk with a note saying that it is for publication on Untold Dylan.
We also have a very lively discussion group “Untold Dylan” on Facebook with around 8500 active members. Just type the phrase “Untold Dylan” in, on your Facebook page or follow this link And because we don’t do political debates on our Facebook group there is a separate group for debating Bob Dylan’s politics – Icicles Hanging Down
I’ve been a Bob Dylan fan since the early 60’s. Influenced by my dad’s eclectic music taste, I was already collecting country blues records and everything I could find by Woody Guthrie, the Carter Family and Jimmie Rodgers and so when I read about the first Dylan LP I immediately ordered a copy. I was there at the Sydney Stadium on 13th April 1966 for the first concert of the Oceania leg of the world tour and for almost every Sydney concert thereafter. Along the way a number of interesting things happened….
The first one relates to Bob’s on stage poetics at the 1966 concert. “This isn’t my guitar” he drawls as he endlessly tunes the guitar, “my guitar got broken here in Australia”. My girlfriend at the time knew the luthier who was repairing it. Apparently Bob had damaged his guitar by closing the lid of the guitar case on it and had been lent the luthier’s own guitar as a temporary replacement. This explains the slightly different sound on the acoustic set of the Sydney concert.
At a 1978 concert at the Sydney Showground One More Cup of Coffee was starting up and just as the chorus began a girl sitting next to me said “would you like a cup of coffee?” and handed me a cup of coffee. That’s a strange coincidence I thought.
Then in 1986 I got a phone call from artist Brett Whiteley. “Guess who’s coming to my studio?” he said. “Aaah, Bob Dylan?” I guessed. “Yes and I’m only inviting you and Martin Sharp”. Brett’s studio was being used for the Bob Dylan press conference at the start of the Australian tour with Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers. It was an event to remember and afterwards I said to Brett, “You know your studio is a sacred site now”. In Australia sacred site’s are important because of their place in traditional Aboriginal culture. It turned out I was right because after Brett died in 1992 the studio was turned into a public museum and is now visited by thousands of students, tourists and art lovers every year.
At the State Theatre in 1992 where Bob did seven concerts we used to run to the front of the stage after a few songs. When I got there, standing right in the middle, a girl next to me threw rose petals onto the stage in front of us. Bob was impressed and came forward to take a look at her and then took a look at me. Later he sang All Along the Watchtower, looking straight at me, tilting his head from side to side and kind of smiling at me as he sang. I didn’t know quite how to react as he was only about 6 feet away, so I eventually smiled back at him. When I did that he immediately looked away and that was it. My friend standing on the other side of me said “did you see that? – he was singing to you”.
Another time when I was late for a show at the Entertainment Centre in Sydney in 1998 I was hurrying across from the carpark. I was walking past the back of the theatre when a limo drew up beside me. Out stepped Bob looking at me before going into the stage door. It would have been so easy to say something but I thought “silence” was the appropriate response and just gave him a nod and a smile.
At the Entertainment Centre in 1986 he sang Happy Birthday. “We have a very special friend here tonight whose birthday is today. So if you all wanna help me out here, I want to sing Happy Birthday to my very special friend. Her name is Queen Esther. So, you know Happy Birthday. You know how it goes. It goes like this.” and we all sang Happy Birthday together. Then Bob says “Anyway, I had to do that, because I forgot to get her a birthday present, thank you, alright”
Being a bit self centred I wondered “what’s he going to give me” as I drove home later. When I got there I saw a For Sale sign had gone up on the house next door while I was at the concert. In the morning I looked out the window and saw that my daughter Ruby had thrown my copy of Tarantula out the window and it was propped up against the wall of the house next door. I thought that’s auspicious and rang my father in law, a bank manager, who came over to see the house and offered to lend me the money to buy it, which I did. After a year or so he said that I didn’t have to pay the money back so I got the house for free. I always think of it as a gift from Bob.
Tim Johnson
Untold Dylan
This is article 1,968 on this site. You can find indexes to series linked under the image of Dylan at the top of the page and some relating to recent series on the home page.
Although no one gets paid for writing, publishing or editing Untold Dylan, it does cost us money to keep the site afloat, safe from hackers, n’er-do-wells etc. We never ask for donations, and we try to survive on the income from our advertisers, so if you enjoy Untold Dylan, and you’ve got an ad blocker, could I beg you to turn it off while here. I’m not asking you to click on ads for the sake of it, but at least allow us to add one more to the number of people who see the full page including the adverts. Thanks.
As for the writing, Untold Dylan is written by people who want to write for Untold Dylan. We welcome articles, contributions and ideas from all our readers. Although no one gets paid, if you are published here, your work will be read by a fairly large number of people across the world, ranging from fans to academics. If you have an idea, or a finished piece send it as a Word file to Tony@schools.co.uk with a note saying that it is for publication on Untold Dylan.
We also have a very lively discussion group “Untold Dylan” on Facebook with around 8500 active members. Just type the phrase “Untold Dylan” in, on your Facebook page or follow this link And because we don’t do political debates on our Facebook group there is a separate group for debating Bob Dylan’s politics – Icicles Hanging Down
Gypsy Davey with a blowtorch he burns out their camps
With his faithful slave Pedro behind him he tramps
With a fantastic collection of stamps
To win friends and influence his uncle
Francis Child’s English and Scottish Popular Ballads mentions eleven variants of the song no. 200, “The Gypsy Laddie”. The song has been floating through the Anglo-Saxon world for about 250 years, with varying lyrics and different titles (“The Gypsy Laddie”, “The Raggle Taggle Gypsy”, “Seven Yellow Gypsies”, “Johnnie Faa”, to name but a few) and tells the story of a Lady who leaves her husband and her rich life out of love for a gypsy. In the oldest version she is enchanted, in other versions abducted, but the punch line is (mostly) the same; when the abandoned Lord has tracked her down, she refuses to return home with him. In 1992, Dylan records it as “Black Jack Davey”, thereby revealing his lyrical interpretation for one of his most beautiful songs from his early years;
Well, she pulled off them high-heeled shoes
Made of Spanish leather.
Got behind him on his horse
And they rode off together,
They both rode off together.
…for “Boots Of Spanish Leather”. And in 2012 Dylan will copy the plot for his own “Tin Angel” – the centuries-old song has been floating through Dylan’s catalogue as well, for over half a century.
Woody Guthrie calls the seductive gypsy “Gypsy Davy” (1944), and that is how he gets a name-check in “Tombstone Blues” in 1965, though not much more than a name-check. The original Gypsy Dave doesn’t have a Pedro on his side, nor does he destroy camps in a jungle. And certainly not with a blowtorch. By the way, this particular soldering tool again seems to have come from Brother Bill, from the same Nova Express fragment that delivers idiom for the second octave (poison, medicine, doctor): “And The Sailor goes into his White Hot Agony Act chasing the doctor around his office like a blowtorch.”
No, the emergence of “Gypsy Dave” has no particular, content-related relevance. It does fit in with Dylan’s sense of tradition, though, like more lyrics in this “rock phase” do echo antique songs – Dylan’s alleged “betrayal” of folk music is quite an exaggerated qualification, in any case. “Desolation Row”, “Queen Jane Approximately”, “Highway 61 Revisited”, “Tell Me, Momma”… in more than a handful of the mercury songs the rocker Dylan warmly greets old folk and blues songs. And apart from alienating attributes like that blowtorch, or that collection of stamps, and apart from the scraped-together character of personal constellations like “Gypsy Davey and Pedro”, and “Belle Starr and Jezebel the nun”, the syntax, too, confirms the suspicion of cut-up in this octave. Or at least the suspicion that Dylan here is trying to suggest cut-up.
Even more striking on this point in the lyrics is the repeated repetition of the subject. In line 2 this happens for the first time (“The city fathers they‘re trying to endorse”), in line 5 again (“The ghost of Belle Starr she hands down her wits”), and in the second octave Dylan is just as lavish with the – superfluous – repetition of the subject:
Now the medicine man comes and he shuffles inside
He walks with a swagger and he says to the bride
Superfluous, and certainly in the English language actually ungrammatical – a “repeated subject” is simply incorrect. Now, poets sometimes resort to it to make a sentence fitting. For the rhythm, for example (“My love, she speaks like silence”), or to work out the metre (“All your seasick sailors, they are rowing home”), or for a rhyme. But for the medicine man line none of these excuses apply, nor does it for, for example the city fathers line; a grammatically correct line like “The city fathers are trying to endorse” has no interfering consequences for rhyme, rhythm or metre.
Here, in the third octave, the poet continues to insert those superfluous repetitions;
Gypsy Davey with a blowtorch he burns out their camps
With his faithful slave Pedro behind him he tramps
… in which, as with the king of Philistines line, the persistent, peculiar, Yoda-like syntax is also starting to stand out. It’s true that this is not unusual for a poet either, to make a sentence “right”, fitting… but Dylan does it here so often that it seems he is using it as a figure of speech.
Yoda has a language of his own, and the reason why George Lucas has let him speak like this, can be followed. About half of Yoda’s text in the original trilogy (in The Empire Strikes Back and in The Return Of The Jedi) is “weird”; the syntax is wrong. English usually has, and quite strictly, as a word order subject-verb-object. Yoda, on the other hand, often chooses object-verb-subject. Not Vader is strong, but “Strong is Vader”. Not you still have much to learn, but “Much to learn, you still have”. Fronting, it is called, although that actually means that the verb is placed in front (which Yoda sometimes does; “Told you, I did”). Lucas himself describes Yoda’s language as “backwards”, but that is an inaccurate description. “Inverted” would be a better definition.
In languages with elevated cases, flexible or “inverted” syntax is more common than in English. In Latin, in a sentence like servus puellam amat (“The slave the girl loves”) it is perfectly clear who is in love with whom (the slave is in love with the object puellam). But in English, the tampering with word order, like Yoda does, creates an exotic effect. And more than that; it suggests archaic wisdom – exactly what Lucas needs.
Inspiration for the “Yoda-ish” was undoubtedly given to Lucas, like to Dylan, by Yiddish. Yoda has the aura and manner of speaking of an old, wise Talmud scholar, he talks – approximately – in a similar way. At least, as old, wise Jews are portrayed by the great Jewish writers, by the Austrian Joseph Roth, by the Czech Franz Kafka and by the Canadian Mordecai Richler.
Richler, the author of The Apprenticeship Of Duddy Kravitz (1959), writes like Dylan constructs his sentences in “Tombstone Blues”. “Of your father I won’t even speak,” for example, and “At the parochial school until he was thirteen years old Duddy met many boys” – a sentence structure identical to Dylans With Pedro behind him he tramps, and more lines in this song.
Archaic wisdom Dylan does not need to suggest in this song, obviously. But apparently browsing through Judges 15 and 16, the Samson-slaying-Philistines-with-a-jawbone-chapters, has triggered a receptivity to odd syntax. In “Tombstone Blues” over a third of the verse lines are “odd” – almost the same percentage, by the way, as Yoda achieves in his first film, in The Empire Strikes Back from 1980 (41%).
Truly wonderful the mind of a poet is.
To be continued. Next up: Tombstone Blues part VIII
—————–
Jochen is a regular reviewer of Dylan’s work on Untold. His books are available via Amazon both in paperback and on Kindle:
This is article 1,968 on this site. You can find indexes to series linked under the image of Dylan at the top of the page and some relating to recent series on the home page.
Although no one gets paid for writing, publishing or editing Untold Dylan, it does cost us money to keep the site afloat, safe from hackers, n’er-do-wells etc. We never ask for donations, and we try to survive on the income from our advertisers, so if you enjoy Untold Dylan, and you’ve got an ad blocker, could I beg you to turn it off while here. I’m not asking you to click on ads for the sake of it, but at least allow us to add one more to the number of people who see the full page including the adverts. Thanks.
As for the writing, Untold Dylan is written by people who want to write for Untold Dylan. We welcome articles, contributions and ideas from all our readers. Although no one gets paid, if you are published here, your work will be read by a fairly large number of people across the world, ranging from fans to academics. If you have an idea, or a finished piece send it as a Word file to Tony@schools.co.uk with a note saying that it is for publication on Untold Dylan.
We also have a very lively discussion group “Untold Dylan” on Facebook with around 8500 active members. Just type the phrase “Untold Dylan” in, on your Facebook page or follow this link And because we don’t do political debates on our Facebook group there is a separate group for debating Bob Dylan’s politics – Icicles Hanging Down
Untold Dylan
You can find indexes to series linked under the image of Dylan at the top of the page and some relating to recent series on the home page.
Although no one gets paid for writing, publishing or editing Untold Dylan, it does cost us money to keep the site afloat, safe from hackers, n’er-do-wells etc. We never ask for donations, and we try to survive on the income from our advertisers, so if you enjoy Untold Dylan, and you’ve got an ad blocker, could I beg you to turn it off while here. I’m not asking you to click on ads for the sake of it, but at least allow us to add one more to the number of people who see the full page including the adverts. Thanks.
As for the writing, Untold Dylan is written by people who want to write for Untold Dylan. We welcome articles, contributions and ideas from all our readers. Although no one gets paid, if you are published here, your work will be read by a fairly large number of people across the world, ranging from fans to academics. If you have an idea, or a finished piece send it as a Word file to Tony@schools.co.uk with a note saying that it is for publication on Untold Dylan.
We also have a very lively discussion group “Untold Dylan” on Facebook with around 8500 active members. Just type the phrase “Untold Dylan” in, on your Facebook page or follow this link And because we don’t do political debates on our Facebook group there is a separate group for debating Bob Dylan’s politics – Icicles Hanging Down
The news that Bob Dylan’s catalogue of songs has been sold made the headlines this week, but tucked away in the small print were several issues that the mass media did not raise, and which really do need fulsome investigation.
One item of course, as you will have realised at once, is that the publisher only bought the rights to 600 songs, whereas as we know there are many more than this. So the hunt is on for the missing songs from the publishers list which are presumably now owned by no one.
Untold Dylan has already stepped in with an offer of $30 for the lot (a reduced price given the fact that we have already done the work of finding them and putting them on this site). We’ll be publishing our list of copyright free Bob in due course.
But before that there is the issue of cleaning up the songs as the publishers have issued a list of words that will need to be removed from Bob’s songs. These words fall into several categories, of which the first one we shall tackle is sexism.
So here we go with the reworked titles for sexually correct Bob as licensed by the new copyright owner.
She Belongs to Me is a good place to start, as it involves issues both of sexism and modern slavery, and so that song now becomes “This person does not belong to me as possession of another person were not a crime in the United States and most of Western Society.”
She’s my baby will now be known as “If this person were a minor then I would have responsibility for that person but otherwise that person, whose sexual orientation is not an issue here, is a free individual.”
She’s on my mind again is henceforth to be known as “That person is on my mind, but not in any sort of nasty way and there is nothing possessive about it.”
Shelter from the storm has a title which of course is no problem at all but the opening line must be changed to “The person that I have met has everything that any free minded person in a liberal democracy would need and is entitled to, and is free to pursue her or his life in the creative arts but it would be wrong of me to comment upon her or his physical appearance.” A little re-writing of the melody and rhythm might be required.
My Woman She’s a Leavin’ will now be known as “Everyone may come and go as everyone pleases as long as each person does not stray onto a military facility or other restricted area.”
My love whose sexual self-identification I shall not mention says nothing,
My love has no need to speak as my love is true unto herself
Other elements may apply here
People carry roses, Make promises by the hours,
My love over whom I claim no possession, has a nice laugh
And we have nothing to do with outmoded symbols of possession
Someday Baby is considered irredeemable and will be removed from the catalogue.
Rainy Day Women must now be sung as “Rainy Day People” of course.
Let me come baby has now been withdrawn from the internet for reasons that we cannot make clear at this point.
Baby coming back from the dead is henceforth to be referred to as “Reincarnation is open to everyone irrespective of their sexual orientation”.
Baby Stop Crying is “It it not appropriate for grown people of any orientation to shed tears except when happy and that person is in possession of a licence from the appropriate authorities, not that this is an authoritarian state of anything but we do need to keep things in order.”
Baby won’t you be my baby now will listed as “Person won’t you be my person?” (Good punctuation is important).
I’ll be your baby tonight is particularly problematic but for the moment will be listed in the new catalogue as “The swapping of children from one family to another without the agreement of the state is a crime in numerous jurisdictions.”
Additionally, when Bob resumes touring the announcer will not say “Ladies and Gentleman” when introducing “Columbia recording artist Bob Dylan.” In fact it is just better if he remains quiet.
So there you are. Just remember, “everyone belongs to the publishing company.” Stay with that thought and you won’t go far wrong.
Untold Dylan
We are approach 2000 articles on this site. You can find indexes to series linked under the image of Dylan at the top of the page and some relating to recent series on the home page.
Although no one gets paid for writing, publishing or editing Untold Dylan, it does cost us money to keep the site afloat, safe from hackers, n’er-do-wells etc. We never ask for donations, and we try to survive on the income from our advertisers, so if you enjoy Untold Dylan, and you’ve got an ad blocker, could I beg you to turn it off while here. I’m not asking you to click on ads for the sake of it, but at least allow us to add one more to the number of people who see the full page including the adverts. Thanks.
As for the writing, Untold Dylan is written by people who want to write for Untold Dylan. We welcome articles, contributions and ideas from all our readers. Although no one gets paid, if you are published here, your work will be read by a fairly large number of people across the world, ranging from fans to academics. If you have an idea, or a finished piece send it as a Word file to Tony@schools.co.uk with a note saying that it is for publication on Untold Dylan.
We also have a very lively discussion group “Untold Dylan” on Facebook with around 8500 active members. Just type the phrase “Untold Dylan” in, on your Facebook page or follow this link And because we don’t do political debates on our Facebook group there is a separate group for debating Bob Dylan’s politics – Icicles Hanging Down
This is part 24 of “All Directions at Once” which attempts to look at Dylan’s songwriting in a way that is slightly different from that used by other commentators.
While with Dirge we have the verbal evidence that the song was written in response to a jokey comment about Dylan’s sentimental change as he got older, with “Wedding Song” (the last composition of 1973), we have no such extraneous commentary to go on. But we can still make a few assumptions based on what we do know.
It is reported that the original version of Dirge was recorded on guitar before being re-worked on piano. Here, we have the counterpoint. Dirge begins, “I hate myself for loving you,” while “Wedding Song,” accompaniment on the recording and on stage by solo guitar begins “I love you more than ever.”
And there is of course a link with “Restless Farewell,” the last song written in 1963, just before he embarked on his first world tour (which ran off and on through much of the year) because by the time Dylan wrote “Wedding Song” he was gearing up to go back onto the road. And it is worth, I think, pausing for a moment to consider the momentousness of this.
The last grand tour of Dylan before 1974, was in 1966, and it took in the United States, Canada, Hawaii, Australia, Scandinavia, the UK, France, and then finally ending back in London. Two months later there was the motorbike accident, and that was that after a tour of 47 shows.
The 1974 tour ran from 3 January to 14 February and took in 40 shows. In the early part of the tour some Planet Waves songs were included but over the course of the tour these seemed to be reduced in number, with only “Forever Young” and occasionally “Wedding Song” remaining on the set list.
That was then the end of the tour for the year, but this time there was eight year gap – Dylan came back 18 months later with the Rolling Thunder Review.
This return to touring is, I think, historically very important, not because of what ultimately happened to create the Never Ending Tour which I think we can best date from 1987 onwards (others put 1988, but let’s not quibble), but because actually going on the road was itself a major change. It was, I think, a try out, not just for Bob, but for members of The Band themselves who in the intervening years had had their own issues. They had retired from touring in 1971 (although they did the occasional one-off gig), not least because Robbie Robertson was said to be trying to overcome his writer’s block, (and indeed such work as he created from around this time was never published), while Richard Manuel was said to have addiction problems.
The tour was noted for the re-writing of the arrangements (not to say melodies and lyrics of some compositions – something which Dylan had not previously indulged in, at least not in such a wholesale way), and the use of a very early synthesizer.
It was very much a joint affair with Dylan performing with the Band, Dylan acoustic solos, and the Band playing their own songs without Dylan. Extracts from the tour were ultimately released as “Before the Flood”.
Planet Waves songs were included at first, but after a short while only “Forever Young” stayed as a regular in the repertoire, which increasingly relied on the most famous songs from Dylan’s repertoire. But they were helped along by contemporary events, as was evident from the cheers every time Bob sang, “Even the president of the United States sometimes must have to stand naked” – which had an extra resonance as this was the time of the Watergate affair. Applications for tickets exceeded the number available many, many times over.
So although this was not its original purpose, ultimately “Tour 74” allowed space for the artistic endeavour and creativity that during the rest of the year and into next year resulted in a staggeringly brilliant collection of new songs. The tour proved Bob still had an audience (and how!) but he was forced to realise that those those attending didn’t want his more recent compositions such as “Dirge” and “Wedding Song,” no matter how brilliant and revolutionary they might be.
So we have a significant disconnect between the tour and the last album. “Dirge” and “Wedding Song” seem to have been written quickly and indeed recorded even faster, and Dylan obviously knew how incredibly good they were, and yet the crowds wanted the old numbers, not this modern stuff. These seemingly urgent and occasionally desperate statements from a man who just has to say it, and has to say it now, were nothing to the fans at the shows. They didn’t want Bob to “tell it like it is,” they wanted him to “tell it as it was” before the Basement, before the accident, and most of the time before JWH.
And yet, and yet, “Wedding Song” really does take us back to a much earlier Dylan, both because it is acoustic, and because it is strophic – (the verse – verse – verse) formulation without any break into a variant section and because of its sheer urgency and vitality.
Image falls onto image as thought pushes thought out of the way, but there is that unrelenting vision that he is not the Leader, he is not here to change everything, certainly not here to tell us what to do. In the words of the “Hitch hikers guide to the galaxy” (a British radio series that started five years later, became phenomenally popular, and still is fondly remembered and regularly re-broadcast) “he’s just this guy, you know.”
It’s never been my duty to remake the world at large
Nor is it my intention to sound a battle charge
Put another way it is “It ain’t me babe” in the sense that I am not a man who tells you what to do, but it is me babe in terms of the man who loves you “more than ever, more than time and more than love” all the way through to that ending, “I love you more than ever now that the past is gone”. (Which immediately makes me think we really should have an index of last lines, as well as our aborted attempt at an index of first lines).
I don’t feel that Dylan was writing about himself or his own experience here, any more than he was in Dirge, any more than most novelists cast themselves as the central character in each novel, any more than an actor plays himself every time he gets on stage. But whether he was or not, this now became irrelevant. The lesson to be learned was that if Bob was going to tour again, and to perform his contemporary compositions, those compositions had to be more immediately accessible to the fans than the final two compositions of 1973. Not personal songs, but something else. The questions was, what?
And yet there is a tremendous sense of power and liberation that comes from his saying goodbye to the “haunted rooms and faces in the street, To the courtyard of the jester which is hidden from the sun” – to the self torment, and to the artificial worlds and false people that were portrayed in the Basement Tapes. In the final pre-tour composition there is a new life, reflecting the fact that “I love you more than ever and I haven’t yet begun,” which makes the view of the fans more ironic than ever.
In short, he doesn’t say, “I’m nothing without you,” but says “you make my life richer”, in a much more interesting way. And he did try to get his fans to understand, for Wedding Song was played nine times between 7 January and 11 February. The tour itself ran from 3 January to 14 February, so he gave it a fair shot, but by and large it wasn’t what the fans wanted.
Of course not every line in Wedding Song is perfect. “Your love cuts like a knife” is as old as pop music, and probably much older. But it is delivered so rapidly amongst all this relentless power, the whole thing simply knocks one sideways and we stop worrying if any of the images have been heard before.
And because of the way the music is written, starting on A minor but falling away to G at the end of each verse, we feel like we have just had a long long sigh, reflecting on all this… we have no idea if it is going to go on or when the end of the song will come. He ends the verses on this downbeat, placing himself as a person less than the woman he loves because she has given him all. Just look at these last lines…
I’d sacrifice the world for you and watch my senses die
But happiness to me is you and I love you more than blood
And if there is eternity I’d love you there again
And I love you more than ever with that love that doesn’t cease
Cause I love you more than ever now that the past is gone
He casts himself as nothing, blown along in the eddies and tides of time, only being here to love this woman. And that was not the message that these fans wanted. They wanted to be told that even the President of the United States sometimes had to stand naked. They wanted the rebellion of 1969, even though it hadn’t happen and the power of the state had survived, they wanted to feel they had power over those in power (which they patently didn’t), and they didn’t want, “I love you more than ever now that the past is gone.”
In short it was a case of “Give me a fantasy, but not that one.”
And there was a deeper issue because these fans still seemingly wanted to change the world, while Dylan’s song proclaims that there is nothing to change in his “Wedding Song” world because he has been given everything. It is in fact a natural outcome of “Times they are a Changing” which although taken up as an anthem of reform and a transfer of power to the young, actually says “change happens, no matter what you do.”
So in “Wedding Song” Bob hasn’t created his happiness, he hasn’t modified the world to find it, he has had it presented to him, and he is happy to leave it at that. As he said at the end of the first verse, “I love you more than life itself, you mean that much to me.”
Quite extraordinarily that message was simply ignored. Bob Dylan was the old Bob Dylan – because the crowd and the promoters said he was.
Yet Bob had produced an album that overall looked deeper into the heart of emotions than he had ever had before – consider what was explored in “Going Going Gone” in that middle 8 that still so occupies my thoughts so many years later…
Grandma said, “Boy, go and follow your heart
And you’ll be fine at the end of the line
All that’s gold isn’t meant to shine
Don’t you and your one true love ever part”
Indeed Forever Young itself now takes on a new meaning – stay forever young so you don’t get close to what I explore in the rest of these songs.
It is sometimes said that as soon as one sees the title “Wedding Song” one must think of Dylan’s own wedding. And maybe that would be true if the song was presented on its own. But it is not. It was presented after Dirge (which of course was never played on this tour, nor indeed on any tour ever), and at the end of the collection.
Above all I reject the notion that “Dylan recorded it [Wedding Song] more or less in the same slapdash style as he did his acoustic albums”. He recorded it in a way that gives it the total power it deserves. The power of one man on his own, the wind buffeting his face as he sits on a rock next to the lady he loves trying to explain himself, stumbling over the words, not quite able to find the right phrase, finding his voice is occasionally lost in the wind, as he says, “I love you” the roar of the wave drowns out the sound of his words.
(Incidentally Heylin’s use of “slapdash” has always struck me as the final proof that the man has no concept of artistic creation. Does he really think that all great art is created by hours and hours of tedious and meticulous work? Sometimes yes of course, but sometimes most certainly not. The merit of great art is not measured by the time it took to create, but by the genius of the conception. If that were not the case we could simply note how long it took each work of art to be created and the one that took the longest could be proclaimed the greatest art on the planet. Stonehenge maybe?)
Wedding Song is a glimpse of real life through a song in an age of technical production, and all the better for that. But it is true that it was not what the fans brought to the concerts by the promotional hype of watching Bob back on stage for the first time in so many years, had been sold.
Where I differ from many commentators (as so often is the case) is in thinking that when Dylan mentions three children, there is some secret point here. For me, he is writing a piece of astoundingly powerful fiction, in which I can empathise with the character at the centre of the story. Bob is a genius songwriter. He doesn’t have to experience this love to write about it. He doesn’t have to have (or have had) “hardly a penny to my name” to be able to write “Tell Ol Bill”.
So was Wedding Song, “Dylan’s last Hail Mary shot at reconciliation with his wife” as has been suggested? No not for me. On its own I might be persuaded, but why on earth would a man who wanted to plot a reconciliation do it in public on an album with a song that followed a piece that started out,
I hate myself for lovin’ you and the weakness that it showed
No, he wrote it because he wanted a contrast with Dirge. And he wrote it because he could. Yes “Forever Young” might have been written for his child, but if it was, that still doesn’t mean “Dirge” and “Wedding Song” were also written for real people relating to real events.
My thought is quite simple: just listen, enjoy some of the most powerful emotions ever expressed in popular or folk music, and then be ready for the monuments that followed.
Here’s a list of the most regularly performed Dylan song from the tour…
Most Likely You’ll Go Your Way (And I’ll Go Mine)
Lay Lady Lay
Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues
Rainy Day Women
It Ain’t Me, Babe
Ballad of a Thin Man
All Along the Watchtower
Ballad of Hollis Brown
Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door
The Times They Are A-Changin’
Don’t Think Twice, It’s Alright
Gates of Eden
Just Like a Woman
It’s Alright Ma (I’m Only Bleeding)
Forever Young
Something There is About You
Highway 61 Revisited
Like a Rolling Stone
Blowin’ in the Wind
Thus Bob was left with a huge problem. He had written Planet Waves which includes songs that he must have recognised were brilliant pieces of songwriting. and yet going back on tour he had had to retreat into performing he greatest hits, which is probably why he was dissatisfied and unhappy with the tour.
He must have known that he was truly back into form as a songwriter, but the fans just wanted the old stuff. So what to do?
The answer had to be either to create a new musical form, or to take an old musical form and re-create it in a way that no one had ever heard before. And that motivation to create a new type of song, a song that told a story that as has so often be reported, “couldn’t be found in a movie” post-tour became the driving force in Bob’s creative life.
It would take much of the rest of the year to get the songs written, but goodness, wasn’t it worth it.
The series continues…
Untold Dylan
We are approach 2000 articles on this site. You can find indexes to series linked under the image of Dylan at the top of the page and some relating to recent series on the home page.
Although no one gets paid for writing, publishing or editing Untold Dylan, it does cost us money to keep the site afloat, safe from hackers, n’er-do-wells etc. We never ask for donations, and we try to survive on the income from our advertisers, so if you enjoy Untold Dylan, and you’ve got an ad blocker, could I beg you to turn it off while here. I’m not asking you to click on ads for the sake of it, but at least allow us to add one more to the number of people who see the full page including the adverts. Thanks.
As for the writing, Untold Dylan is written by people who want to write for Untold Dylan. We welcome articles, contributions and ideas from all our readers. Although no one gets paid, if you are published here, your work will be read by a fairly large number of people across the world, ranging from fans to academics. If you have an idea, or a finished piece send it as a Word file to Tony@schools.co.uk with a note saying that it is for publication on Untold Dylan.
We also have a very lively discussion group “Untold Dylan” on Facebook with around 8500 active members. Just type the phrase “Untold Dylan” in, on your Facebook page or follow this link And because we don’t do political debates on our Facebook group there is a separate group for debating Bob Dylan’s politics – Icicles Hanging Down
Polish-American writer Isaac Singer, influenced by the slave/master writings of Fredrich Nietzsche, pens a modern short satirical story “Yentl, The Yeshiva Boy” that brings attention to the rift between mystical and traditional aspects of the Judaic religion.
Advocates of the mystical view seek an emotional connection to a mysterious and transcendental God while those of the rational view focus on laws studied exclusively by males in Yeshiva schools – laws that, for example, place the female for the most part in the kitchen; even shaven-headed and walled-in at times. Singer’s story shows that he clearly sides with the former view.
Yentl rebels against the social order imposed upon her, dresses up as a man, and studies Judaic law with a male partner; her male friend marries a woman whom he’s expected to because the gal he really loves, is told to reject him. Yentl, though she falls in love with her Yeshiva partner, gets hitched to the traditionally minded gal. Avoids having sex with her, and then divorces the devoted girl in order that the Yeshiva school mate can leave his unhappy marriage to be with the one he loves.
In the meantime, doesn’t he fall in love with Yentl who reveals her secret to him – she’s actually a lady. Yentl tells him that she’s not interested in furthering their love relationship because she wants to continue on with her Judaic studies as painful as that may be. Not exactly a joyous Romantic ending to the story.
The Yentl story is made into a movie starring singer Barbara Streisand. The songstress doesn’t make a convincing looking male on the screen by a long shot. The movie ends with Yentl quite contentedly heading off to America in search of herself – her syrupy songs not befitting the original story by Singer:
Oh why is it that every time
I close my eyes he's there
The water shining on his skin
The sunlight in his hair
And all the while I'm thinking things
That I can never share
With him
(Barbara Streisand: The Way You Make Me Feel ~ A&M Bergman/Legrand)
Singer/songwriter/musician Bob Dylan messes around with Isaac Singer’s story and film.
In the double-edged lyrics below, said to be written for Streisand, the singer/songwriter provides a response to the cross-dressing lady’s song above – in it, the narrator suggests how Yentl can relieve her sexual tension:
Lay, lady, lay
Lay across my big brass bed
Stay, lady, stay
Stay with your man awhile
Until the break of day
Let me see you make him smile ....
Why wait any longer for the world to begin
You can have your cake and eat it too
Why wait any longer for the one you love
When he's standing in front of you
(Bob Dylan: Lay, Lady, Lay)
Innovating on the rather sexually charged metaphors found in the Holy Book:
As the apple tree among the trees of the wood
So is my beloved among the sons
I sat down under his shadow with great delight
And his fruit was sweet to my taste
(Song Of Solomon 2:3)
Reverting to the old way of dealing with a non-submissive, independent-minded female ~ do away with her altogether ~ be frowned upon in the song lyrics following:
She said, "No dear"
I said, "Your words are not clear
You better spit out your gum"
She screamed till her face got so red
Then she fell on the floor
And I covered her up, and then
Thought I'd go look through her drawer
(Bob Dylan: Fourth Time Round)
Nor, below, is doing away with an unfaithful partner considered murder most fair:
Big Jim lay covered up, killed by a penknife in the back
Rosemary on the gallows, she didn't even blink
The hanging judge was sober, he hadn't had a drink
The only person on the scene missing was the Jack Of Hearts
(Bob Dylan: Lily, Rosemary, And The Jack Of Hearts)
Doing away with an artistic competitor by other means be apparently a different matter.
Untold Dylan
There are getting on for 2000 articles on this site. You can find indexes to series linked under the image of Dylan at the top of the page and some relating to recent series on the home page.
Although no one gets paid for writing, publishing or editing Untold Dylan, it does cost us money to keep the site afloat, safe from hackers, n’er-do-wells etc. We never ask for donations, and we try to survive on the income from our advertisers, so if you enjoy Untold Dylan, and you’ve got an ad blocker, could I beg you to turn it off while here. I’m not asking you to click on ads for the sake of it, but at least allow us to add one more to the number of people who see the full page including the adverts. Thanks.
As for the writing, Untold Dylan is written by people who want to write for Untold Dylan. We welcome articles, contributions and ideas from all our readers. Although no one gets paid, if you are published here, your work will be read by a fairly large number of people across the world, ranging from fans to academics. If you have an idea, or a finished piece send it as a Word file to Tony@schools.co.uk with a note saying that it is for publication on Untold Dylan.
We also have a very lively discussion group “Untold Dylan” on Facebook with around 8500 active members. Just type the phrase “Untold Dylan” in, on your Facebook page or follow this link And because we don’t do political debates on our Facebook group there is a separate group for debating Bob Dylan’s politics – Icicles Hanging Down
We just recorded our latest song ‘Marilyn Monroe – Endless Night‘ that was of course inspired by Mr. Dylan’s ‘Murder Most Foul‘ and is about the suspected murder of M.M. and has numerous references to the people in the plot and is put together like an Agatha Christie play and includes a number of her play names that are highlighted in the lyrics.
Like a well written mystery
Played out on the stage of history
All the actors played their part
From the 1st scene to the last
The world saw the opening scene
The plot was cruel, the plot was mean
‘Happy Birthday Mr. President, you fill me with glee
How I wish you felt the same about me’!
The same about me’!
Wish you felt the same about me’!
John, Bobby, Jimmy and Sam
Each one an influential man
The big four always knocking on your door
In the end they didn’t want you no more
Love from a strangerA stranger in the night
The curtain came down
On an endless night
The C.I.A. and The Mob one time
Were both together partners in crime
They wanted Fidel out of the scene
He was polluting their American Dream
Some say it was a put-up-job
By the C.I.A. and The Mob
You’ve had a red or two in your bed
Is that why they wanted you dead?
Sam warned you not to sing
Keeping quiet wasn’t your thing
Who were those uninvited guests
Cleaning up all the mess?
There was nothing, nothing you wrote
Not in black and white
You didn’t leave a note
On this endless night
Before the end you took a personal call
There’s an unfinished portrait hanging on the wall
The scene was clean, it was complete
The maid furiously washing the sheets
They said you went at half past ten
Were you alone or surrounded by men?
There were bruises on your back
Like you’d been beaten and attacked
Your stomach was empty, it was clean
There were no needles found at the scene
Something seemed foul, something was wrong
Your secret red diary was gone
The deed had been done
They turned out your lights
They didn’t do it with a gun
On this endless night
On this endless night
On this endless night
Well, The big four met grisly deaths
Staring down a barrel as they took their last breaths
John, Bobby, Jimmy and Sam
Were you their Sacrificial Lamb?
Their Sacrificial Lamb
Were you their Sacrificial Lamb?
Judy’s ‘Somewhere Over The Rainbow’
Played as they lowered the casket of Monroe
No-one said Kaddish over her grave, no-one cried
Who was really shocked that Marilyn had died?
Now the orchestra is quiet, there’s no more song
All the leading actors are long gone
The stage is dark and without light
On this lonely cold endless night
The stage is dark and without light
On this lonely cold endless night
The stage is dark and without light
On this lonely cold endless night
On this lonely cold endless night
There are getting on for 2000 articles on this site. You can find indexes to series linked under the image of Dylan at the top of the page and some relating to recent series on the home page.
Although no one gets paid for writing, publishing or editing Untold Dylan, it does cost us money to keep the site afloat, safe from hackers, n’er-do-wells etc. We never ask for donations, and we try to survive on the income from our advertisers, so if you enjoy Untold Dylan, and you’ve got an ad blocker, could I beg you to turn it off while here. I’m not asking you to click on ads for the sake of it, but at least allow us to add one more to the number of people who see the full page including the adverts. Thanks.
As for the writing, Untold Dylan is written by people who want to write for Untold Dylan. We welcome articles, contributions and ideas from all our readers. Although no one gets paid, if you are published here, your work will be read by a fairly large number of people across the world, ranging from fans to academics. If you have an idea, or a finished piece send it as a Word file to Tony@schools.co.uk with a note saying that it is for publication on Untold Dylan.
We also have a very lively discussion group “Untold Dylan” on Facebook with around 8500 active members. Just type the phrase “Untold Dylan” in, on your Facebook page or follow this link And because we don’t do political debates on our Facebook group there is a separate group for debating Bob Dylan’s politics – Icicles Hanging Down
The king of the Philistines his soldiers to save
Puts jawbones on their tombstones and flatters their graves
Puts the pied pipers in prison and fattens the slaves
Then sends them out to the jungle
After 13 July 2014, Mario Götze will be the world’s most famous and sung Götze even in academic circles; in the 113th minute of the final of the World Cup in Brazil, he scores the only, and thus winning, goal against Argentina, yielding Germany a world title for the fourth time around.
As a successful player of Borussia Dortmund and later Bayern Munich, Götze has of course long been a well-known, great player in the world of football, but until July 2014, in academic circles, “Götze” refers first and foremost to the distant ancestor Georg Heinrich Götze (1667-1728), the Lutheran theologian, superintendent and polywriter from Leipzig. The VD18, the Verzeichnis der im deutschen Sprachraum erschienenen Drucke des 18. Jahrhunderts (“Index of the 18th century prints published in the German language area”), the immense project that collects all German printed works from the eighteenth century, already counts 84 Götze titles, the VD17 eighty titles; sermons, biographical writings and disputes, mostly.
In his days, the popularity of his printed sermons even leads to language innovations. For example, the sermon in response to riots at a pub in Jena at the end of the seventeenth century, when Götze is a superintendent in that student town. At the Löbdertor, in the former Carmelite monastery, there is an inn, Zum Gelben Engel (“Under the Yellow Angel”), at that time. Frequented by both bourgeoisie and students, and that of course sometimes goes wrong. As on a Friday evening in 1693, but this time it does go very wrong indeed: after the fight, the corpse of a student remains on the street.
Götze is furious. Two days later, Sunday, he preaches vehemently in church against this scandal, and shouts at the congregation: “Es ist bei dieser Mordhandel hergegangen wie dort stehe geschrieben: Philister über dir, Simson! – This murder has gone down as it has been written there: Philistines upon thee, Samson!”
It catches on. That same Sunday, roaring students go through the town of Jena with their new battle cry. “Philistines upon thee, Simson!” From now on, the citizens of Jena will be called Philistines by the academic part of the city. It soon blows over to other cities, and already in the middle of the eighteenth century Philistine is synonymous with “anti-intellectual”, a swear word to indicate that someone despises beauty, art, intellect and spirituality, or is too stupid to understand it. In the nineteenth century, the Prince of Poets Goethe eventually elevates the new meaning to the dictionary once and for all:
Was ist ein Philister?
Ein hohler Darm,
Mit Furcht und Hoffnung ausgefüllt. Daß Gott erbarm!
(What is a philistine?
A hollow gut,
Filled with fear and hope.
God have mercy!)
… and in this same nineteenth century it is adopted in that sense by the English poet and cultural critic Matthew Arnold for the English language area (in Culture and Anarchy, 1869).
In 1965, when Dylan uses the word in “Tombstone Blues”, it is used in that condescending sense by Ginsberg, by Kerouac, by Richard Fariña, and presumably Dylan also comes across it with Proust (it is one of Proust’s favourite insults), or perhaps with Chekhov (“though they are Philistines, yet they have a charm of their own”), but either way: Dylan too undoubtedly associates “Philistine” with art-barbarism. His king of the Philistines, after all, has quite a distaste for cheerful street musicians, so he has all the pied pipers locked up in jail.
Dylan’s first association, however, goes back to the source, is the association of the Bible reader; Judges 15, Samson and the Philistines. Particularly traceable by the king’s somewhat bizarre grave decoration, of course (“Puts jawbones on their tombstones”):
And he found a new jawbone of an ass, and put forth his hand, and took it, and slew a thousand men therewith. And Samson said, With the jawbone of an ass, heaps upon heaps, with the jaw of an ass have I slain a thousand men. And it came to pass, when he had made an end of speaking, that he cast away the jawbone out of his hand, and called that place Ramathlehi.
(Judges 15: 15-17)
… which may be seen as an expression of bad taste, to adorn the gravestones of his fallen soldiers with the very weapon with which they were killed. But then again, on the other hand, perfectly fitting within the Christian tradition. After all, Jesus’ instrument of execution, the cross, has not only become the Christian symbol, but also the shape of most tombstones – although the Messianic story gives little reason to think that this is the symbol with which Jesus would want to be worshipped, commemorated and celebrated.
Immediately following this traceable Philistine-Samson-jawbone-pied piper association series, the poet breaks the relative narrative logic again. The king fattens the slaves. “Slaves” may well be inspired by Dylan’s pleasure in finding rhymes “that have never been rhymed before” (it’s safe to assume that the rhyme flatters their graves with fatten the slaves has never, ever been used before), but from which dark, subterranean corners of the mind this rather specific, completely unusual word combination pops up, is rather hard to follow. From the New York Public Library newspaper archive, perhaps.
In Chronicles the autobiographer Dylan recounts how in the early sixties, when he starts to feel the itch to become a songwriter, he feels the need “to slow my mind down”. He doesn’t know exactly what he’s looking for, but he does know where to find it: in newspaper articles from the nineteenth century – which can be read on microfilm in the New York Public Library. For a page and a half, Dylan then sketches a colourful mosaic of themes, impressions and memories from all those articles in newspapers such as the Memphis Daily Eagle, the Savannah Daily Herald, the Pennsylvania Freeman and the Brooklyn Daily Times. In that 670-word sketch of the “godawful truth”, the phenomenon of slavery is a chorus; Dylan mentions eleven times a slavery related subject (abolition, slave-free, plantation, slavecrats) as an example of what he finds there – “it’s all so unrealistic, grandiose and sanctimonious at the same time.”
And among all these godawfully truthful reports, his eye may have stuck on the article “Fattening Slaves To Kill” in the Sacramento Daily Union, 3 October 1889:
Fattening slaves in a park and feeding them up like animals destined for the table, and then leading them to a shamble where they are slaughtered like oxen, cut into pieces and shared bit by bit among hungry cannibals — such is the practice which is permitted, according to M. Fondese, a French explorer, in some of the French, Belgian, Portuguese and even British territories in Übanghi.
… a unrealistic, grandiose report that baffles the reader from one bewilderment to the next. And one may be inclined to let pass that these cannibalistic practices are taking place in the French, Belgian and Portuguese jungle territories, but it is happening even in the British territories. That gruesome detail must have shocked the young, receptive Dylan even more – at least enough to grant that fattening the slaves a permanent place in the creative part of his brain. From which, four years later, when the beat poet seeks a rhyme for flattering their graves, it reappears.
To be continued. Next up: Tombstone Blues part VII
———
Jochen is a regular reviewer of Dylan’s work on Untold. His books are available via Amazon both in paperback and on Kindle:
This is article 1,968 on this site. You can find indexes to series linked under the image of Dylan at the top of the page and some relating to recent series on the home page.
Although no one gets paid for writing, publishing or editing Untold Dylan, it does cost us money to keep the site afloat, safe from hackers, n’er-do-wells etc. We never ask for donations, and we try to survive on the income from our advertisers, so if you enjoy Untold Dylan, and you’ve got an ad blocker, could I beg you to turn it off while here. I’m not asking you to click on ads for the sake of it, but at least allow us to add one more to the number of people who see the full page including the adverts. Thanks.
As for the writing, Untold Dylan is written by people who want to write for Untold Dylan. We welcome articles, contributions and ideas from all our readers. Although no one gets paid, if you are published here, your work will be read by a fairly large number of people across the world, ranging from fans to academics. If you have an idea, or a finished piece send it as a Word file to Tony@schools.co.uk with a note saying that it is for publication on Untold Dylan.
We also have a very lively discussion group “Untold Dylan” on Facebook with around 8500 active members. Just type the phrase “Untold Dylan” in, on your Facebook page or follow this link And because we don’t do political debates on our Facebook group there is a separate group for debating Bob Dylan’s politics – Icicles Hanging Down
As we all know Bob has sold his music catalogue for vast amounts of money. He obviously knows that when his time finally comes, and he passes away to wherever it is that people pass away to, if anywhere, there will be an incredible upsurge of interest in his music.
